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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.

Published in China in 1989, this book caused a sensation, reportedly selling as many as 300,000 copies. Described as the first "descriptive study" of the reality of China. In order to raise national awareness of the need for environmental protection, it examines the agricultural, environmental, and resource problems that China was likely to encounter in the course of modernization and predicts that the future would likely be even worse. The book was banned immediately after publication.

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.

This book tells the story of China's first people's commune - the Chayashan People's Commune in the author's hometown. Chayashan is a township located in Suiping County, Xinyang City, southern Henan (now part of Zhumadian District). It is the location of the country's first people's commune established by Mao Zedong in 1958, and was also a model commune during the Great Leap Forward period. At the Lushan Conference in 1959, the commune was used in Mao Zedong's counterattack against Peng Dehuai, a general who opposed Mao's policies.  The author Kang Jian is a war veteran. More than thirty years after the Great Famine, Kang Jian visited the villages in Chayashan to conduct an oral history investigation. He used oral interviews to record the daily lives and experiences of farmers under collective economic practices. The author writes in the form of interviews, showing the history of Chayashan People's Commune in detail, and using specific cases to present the relationship between national political behavior and individual destiny.

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.

This monograph by Sun Liping, a professor at Tsinghua University, was published by China Literature Publishing House in 2003. The author systematically analyzes a series of changes in Chinese social life since the 1990s. The book discusses the meaning and characteristics of fractured society; the formation and background of fractured society; widening income gaps and the formation of vulnerable groups; the new urban-rural dual structure; trust crisis and social order; social conflicts and institutional innovation, etc.

The author of this book, Luo Pinghan, is a native of Anhua County, Hunan Province. He graduated from the Party History Department of Renmin University of China and served as director and professor of the Party History Teaching and Research Department of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. This book was published by Fujian People's Publishing House in 2003. The book is divided into nine chapters, narrating the history of the people's communes from the perspective of an orthodox view of historical development. The time nodes selected by the author include the rise, tide, adjustment, repetition, retreat, and disintegration of the Great Leap Forward. With Mao Zedong's affirmation, the system of people's communes was rapidly promoted across the country in 1958. At that time, the people's commune was both a production organization and a grassroots political power. Its rise and fanatical development are closely related to the subsequent Great Famine. As a scholar within the system, the author’s view of history also belongs to the orthodox ideology. Although this book is narrated from the official ideology of the CCP, it uses rich and detailed historical materials to comprehensively and systematically introduce the history of the People's Communes, giving it a reference value for a comprehensive understanding of this movement.

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 is the first book in author Eva's "Famine Trilogy," in which she traveled to Qin'an County, Tongwei County, and Tianshui District in Gansu Province as well as to Yaozhou and Tuxian County in Shaanxi Province in 2011. She interviewed more than two hundred survivors of the Great Famine, with the oldest person being ninety-five years old and the youngest being fifty-eight years old. This book allows these lowest class, mostly uneducated peasants to speak and provide their own witness, leaving behind their voices and oral history. Based on interviews with more than fifty interviewees, the book contains the names of more than five hundred victims and forty-nine incidents of cannibalism.

During the three years of famine from 1959 to 1961, Tongwei's unnatural deaths due to starvation and its related factors amounted to one-third of the county's population. Mr. Zhang Dafa, who worked in Tongwei for many years and later took part in the preparation of the new Tongwei County Record. Published in 2005 through the Dingxi Writers' Association, this is a collection of his many social research reports on the Tongwei issue, "Jinqiao Luwan," which profoundly reveals the tragedy and gravity of the Great Famine, a man-made disaster, within the boundaries of a single county.

The author of this book, Mu Xin, was an early member of the CPC and served as chief editor of "Guangming Daily" in the 1950s. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was a member of the Central Committee's Cultural Revolutionary Group. In 1967, he was defeated and imprisoned in the Imperial Prison (Qincheng Prison). This book was published in Hong Kong in 1997. Because of the author's status, this book is helpful for understanding high-level circumstances during the pre-Cultural Revolution and early Cultural Revolution period.

This book is a historical record of the 1959 Lushan Conference written by Li Rui. Based on the author's personal experience and the literature of the relevant departments of the Communist Party of China, the author has recorded the important points and events before and after the meeting. The first edition of this book was published in April 1989 by the Spring and Autumn Publishing House and Hunan Education Publishing House in mainland China; the updated edition was published in June 1994 by Henan People's Publishing House.

The author of this book, Ding Shu, is a Chinese scholar living in the United States. Published in 1991 by the Hong Kong-based "Nineties Magazine", this book is the first monograph on the Great Famine in China. It has been described by some scholars as the cornerstone of the study of the Great Famine in China. The book was later updated and reprinted. The book starts from the cooperative movement and moves on to the Great Leap Forward, the Great Iron and Steel Refining, the People's Commune, the Satellite Release and the Great Communist Wind; then, it turns to the Lushan Conference against right-leaning as well as the 7,000 People's Congress in 1962. The author collected almost all the information that could be collected at that time and summarized it to describe the situation of this great famine and its causes and consequences. The content of this book is from the website of the Chinese blog "Bianchengsuixiang" (编程随想).

This book presents the dramatic life of Mao Zedong, revealing a wealth of unheard-of facts: why Mao joined the Communist Party, how he came to sit at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, and how he seized China step by step. Writers Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday took ten years to complete this book, interviewing hundreds of Mao's relatives and friends, Chinese and foreign informants and witnesses who worked and interacted with Mao as well as dignitaries from various countries. Purchase link：https://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679746323.

During the Cultural Revolution, 14.03 million urban junior and senior high school students said goodbye to their parents and families and left the cities to receive "re-education" in the "wide world." 10.48 million young intellectuals who had been sent to the army or returned to their hometowns were resettled in rural communities and squads. 1.26 million were placed in the newly-formed youth collectives and teams, while another 2.29 million were accepted by state-run farms and production and construction corps. The production and construction corps became the most concentrated place for intellectual youths, and had an undeniably important position in the whole movement of educated youths going to the countryside. This book describes the rise and fall of the production and construction corps and the fate of the educated youths who went to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.