In August 2008, after the 100-day anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, rescue teams began to withdraw and the media stopped reporting on the casualties of school employees, teachers, and students. Chengdu environmental worker Tan Zuoren and local volunteers, however, were still searching for the cause of the collapse of school buildings within the ruins. As winter arrived, Tan Zuoren and his colleague Xie Yihui trekked through more than 80 towns and villages in 10 counties and cities, covering a total of 3,000 kilometers. Finally, before the May 12 anniversary, they issued a report of their investigation, which was the first independent inquiry report on the Sichuan earthquake’s impact on schools. At the same time, Beijing artist Ai Weiwei furthered civilian investigation and new volunteers arrived in Sichuan to search for the names of students who died. This documentary is an incomplete record of a civilian investigation and a piece of testimony submitted to the court charging Tan Zuoren with “suspected subversion of the state.”
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
In 1930, a mutiny erupted in the Red Army in the town of Futian. In the ensuring purge, more than 700 officers were executed. After this, the campaign to root out Anti-Bolshevik (AB) groups spread to various parts of China, with 70,000 executed. Occurring just nine years after the founding of the CCP, it is one of the earliest and most significant purges in the party's early history.
The first person to pay attention to the Futian Incident was Professor Dai Xiangqing of the Jiangxi Provincial Party School. Starting in late 1979, he and other colleagues went to southern Jiangxi to collect materials, conduct interviews and investigate, and found that this was an unjust and wrong case, and began to publish articles on the matter.
In the early 1980s, Dai Xiangqing sent his article to a senior general in the PLA, Xiao Ke. After that, the research on the Futian Incident attracted the attention of senior central officials. The CCP's party history research agency sent people to Hunan and Jiangxi to investigate and collect materials. The Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China sent a review team for the Futian Incident and reported the vindication documents to the central government, but even today there is currently no official conclusion on the matter.
This book is an important study of the early history of the Communist Party of China, often mentioned by prominent independent historians, such as Yang Kuisong. As an officially recognized research project, this book does not make ideological breakthroughs, but its detailed historical materials, and its data index make it particularly valuable for understanding this historical event.
This book was published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1994.
This is a collection of essays by Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. The title, inspired by Hannah Arendt, covers a wide range of fields from poetry and movies to politics and ethics, and tells the stories of fascinating people, the construction of their inner world and external lives. These people include Hai Zi, Wang Xiaobo, Arendt, Woolf, Beauvoir, Tarkovsky, Kremer, Herbert, Havel, and many others. Behind these seemingly unrelated names, there are hints of these two interdependent spiritual dimensions: on the one hand, the construction of the external world in which we live; on the other hand, the construction of our own inner world, which cannot be neglected. This book, published by Renmin University of China Press in 2003, has had a significant impact on the development of civil society in China.
Zhang Zuhua is an independent scholar in China. In his early years, he served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, Secretary of the Youth League Committee of the Central State Organs. Later, he worked at a private research institute, mainly engaged in political modernization, the theory and practice of constitutional democracy, and China's political reform. He was a key participant in China's Charter 08 in 2008. This book is a collection of his political essays.
This book is Gao Hua's next masterpiece after *How the Red Sun Rose*. It entails a selection of papers published by the author between 1988 and 2004, covering the fields of Republican history, Communist Party history, and contemporary Chinese history. It captures the historical interaction between the present and the past. Gao reflects deeply on the far-reaching Chinese Communist Revolution. With a rigorous and empirical research methodology, he sketches a complex and colorful picture of history, presenting the multiple facets of twentieth-century China's history.
Bo Gu (博古), real name Qin Bangxian (秦邦憲), was the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1931-1935, leaving his post as General Secretary of the CCP after the Zunyi Conference. The author of this book, who is Bo Gu's nephew, describes some important historical points in the early days of the Communist Party, the various activities among the top leaders of the CCP, such as Mao Zedong, and their relationships through the narratives and circumstantial testimonies of a number of knowledgeable people.
Mr. Chen Cheng (courtesy name Cixiu; alias Shisou) served as the commander of the KMT army, commander-in-chief of the group army, commander-in-chief of the theater of operations, and chief of the general staff of the KMT. After the defeat of the Kuomintang army in Taiwan, Chen Cheng served the Administrative Yuan as Vice President of the Kuomintang. The volumes associated with *Chen Cheng's Memoirs* were published by Taiwan's National Museum of History in 2005. The series is divided into six volumes: *The Northern Expedition and the Chaos* (one volume), *The War between the Nationalists and Communists* (one volume), *The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression* (two volumes), and ***The Construction of Taiwan*** (two volumes). The first volume, *The War between the Nationalists and Communists* includes three parts: *Suppressing the Communists - Memories of the Military*, *Summary of Mr. Chen's Words and Actions*, and *Correspondence and Telegrams*. The book has original historical materials related to the five sieges and the counter-insurgency. In particular, this is the first time that important historical materials regarding the correspondence between Chiang Chung-cheng (courtesy name of Chiang Kai-shek) and Cixiu have been made public.
The author of this book, Lu Jianhua (pen name Wen Lu), was a former member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who published this book in 1993. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2005 for "allegedly leaking state secrets" in connection with the "espionage case" involving journalist Cheng Xiang.
Written by Chinese liberal intellectual Liu Junning, this book circulated underground in 2006. The book parses the fundamentals of democracy as well as historical experience. It was quickly banned in China.
On February 9, 2010, Tan Zuoren was tried in the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court for the crime of inciting subversion against the state. Ai Xiaoming and her team recorded the three days before and after the verdict, the mindsets of Tan Zuoren’s friends and relatives, and how the lawyers carried out their work.
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
The author Wang Ming was an early member of the Communist Party of China (CCP) and the first of the "28 and a half Bolsheviks," who lost power after the Yan'an Rectification and were gradually marginalized by Mao. After the Yan'an Rectification, the Internationalists, led by him, lost power in the party. He was gradually ostracized by Mao Zedong, who expatriated him to the Soviet Union in 1956. In his book, Wang Ming recounts his decades-long feud with Mao. It provides a fascinating insight into the early history of the CCP.
Zhang Zhan, born in 1983, is a Chinese lawyer and a dissident of the Communist Party system. In early February 2020, she rushed from Shanghai to Wuhan, which was under lockdown due to the COVID-19 epidemic, to conduct on-the-spot interviews and released a series of video reports on Wuhan's lockdown. More than three months later, she was arrested by Chinese police for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" and taken to Shanghai for detention.
In December 2020, she was sentenced to four years in prison for picking quarrels and provoking trouble. Zhang Zhan went on hunger strike in the detention center and prison, and there were reports that he was critically ill several times. Her courage and resistance attracted the attention of the international community.
The book *Free Zhang Zhan* was edited and created by Wang Jianhong, the head of the "Zhang Zhan Concern Group" on the Internet. It brings together Zhang Zhan's articles and self-media posts published on the Internet, as well as interviews of Zhang Zhan before she lost her freedom, and interviews, as well as poems and articles from outsiders supporting Zhang Zhan. The book reviews the course of Zhang Zhan's case, Zhang Zhan's struggle in prison and the repercussions it aroused at home and abroad. It was published on May 13, 2024 when Zhang Zhan was released from prison after serving her sentence.
This book preserves and records the history of Wuhan's lockdown in China due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Nowadays, Zhang Zhan's articles and words of support for her have been censored and blocked in China, which makes the book even more precious.
The year 2003 was known as the birth of the Weiquan—the rights defense–movement, which was marked by the Sun Zhigang incident in Guangzhou. At the same time, a campaign began to get justice for Huang Jing, a teacher from Hunan who was sexually assaulted and killed by her boyfriend. The campaign involved the victim’s family, netizens, feminist scholars and activists, and lasted for several years. This documentary records the process of Huang Jing’s case from filing to post-judgement, and analyzes the broader issue of sexual violence against women in China.
The films in this series are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
More than 70 years ago, a massive wave of revolutionary terror swept through the CCP-led Jiangxi Soviet Union. Thousands of Red Army officers and soldiers, as well as members of the Party and the general public in the base area, were brutally murdered in a purge called the "Purging of the AB Troupe." Gao Hua's article examines why Mao Zedong initiated the "purge of the AB Group" in the Red Army and the base areas. What was Mao's rationale for the Great Purge? What is the relationship between the Great Terror and the establishment of a new society? Why did Mao stop using the "Fighting the AB Groups" as a means of resolving internal conflicts in the Party after he assumed real power in the CCP?
Originally published in Hong Kong in Chinese in 2000, Gao Hua’s epic description of an early Communist Party campaign against dissent describes a pattern of thought reform and control that would hold true for decades to come. Written despite official harassment and Gao’s failing health, How the Red Sun Rose is a touchstone for China’s unofficial history movement. It was translated into English in 2019 and published by Columbia University Press. Purchase here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/how-the-red-sun-rose/9789629968229.
This report focuses on the human rights situation in detention centers in China. Mr. Huang Sha distributed the questionnaire to the practicing lawyers he knew, and then the practicing lawyers took the questionnaire and filled it out in the form of questions and answers when they met detainees in the detention centers. The questionnaires were then collected and counted, resulting in a research report. The span of time for filling out the questionnaire in the detention center is: from July 2, 2019 to November 19, 2019. There were 101 valid questionnaires recovered.
The Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989 and the subsequent mass arrests and purges created tens of thousands of June Fourth victims. Among them were June Fourth victims who fell into a pool of blood, the June Fourth disabled who were shot, the families of the June Fourth victims and the severely disabled, the June Fourth prisoners of conscience who were sentenced to imprisonment or re-education-through-labor, and the June Fourth victims who were subjected to other political persecution. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of June Fourth, as part of Chinese civil society's efforts to recover the historical truth and rebuild historical memory, this report gives a basic description of the suffering of the June Fourth victims and their arduous journey over the past 20 years. It also analyzes the systemic factors that have contributed to the victims' suffering and proposes corresponding recommendations on how to change their living conditions.
Wang Lihong is a Beijing netizen, civilian journalist, and public service volunteer. Wang was accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for supporting three netizens in Fujian. On August 12, 2011, the case was heard for the first time in the Wenyuhe Court of the People's Court of Chaoyang District, Beijing. This film includes interviews with Wang Lihong's relatives, friends, defense lawyers and netizens, and records the historical scene of onlookers in the courts.
Ai Xiaoming’s film “Postcard,” also released in 2011, elaborates Wang Lihong’s activism in broader strokes, while “Let the Sunshine Reach the Earth” focuses on the process of her trial.
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.