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Article
On Family Background
Yu Luoke (May 1, 1942 - March 5, 1970): Worker, freelance writer, and public intellectual.
Yu was born into an educated family in northeastern China, which for a period of time was under Japanese occupation. His father studied on a state scholarship in Waseda University in Tokyo, while his mother came from a wealthy family in Beijing and studied business at Tokyo Girls High School. When the two returned to China, they went into business, married, and had three children.
When the CCP took power, the family was declared part of the “bourgeois class” and like other “black elements”--classes of people who the party declared to be enemies–was persecuted. The father was arrested in 1952 on charges of tax evasion and released. In 1957, Yu Luoke’s parents were declared Rightists and sent to labor camps. In 1959, Yu graduated from high school with highest honors but as the offspring of an undesirable class was not permitted to attend university. In 1961, he was allowed to work on a farm in a Beijing suburb, where he realized that class identity was also important in rural China–landlords and their children were even beaten to death. In 1964 he returned to the city and apprenticed at a machinery factory. Yu realized that he was part of an untouchable caste in Maoist China and would be condemned forever, no matter what he believed or how hard he worked.
These experiences were the genesis of Yu’s essay, which became one of the most famous texts of the Mao era. Yu wrote it at the start of the Cultural Revolution. The ten-thousand character essay is called chushenglun, or “On Family Background” (sometimes translated as “On Class Origins"). In it, he warned that the “five black categories'' were becoming a permanent underclass, while China’s rulers were from the hongwulei, or “five red categories:” poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary officials, and revolutionary martyrs, including their family members, children, and grandchildren. He warned of a new ruling class based on bloodlines.
The essay was published in a journal that Yu and his brother Yu Luowen called the "Journal of Secondary School Cultural Revolution." In January 1967, about thirty thousand copies were printed, and the young men began distributing them around the capital, selling them for two cents a copy. They sold out in a few hours. In February, they printed another eighty thousand copies.
Soon, hundreds of letters each day arrived at Yu Luoke’s local post office—so many that he had to go collect them in person. The missives detailed how the Communists’ policies had caused them to suffer. People traveled from across China to visit them at their home, excited that someone finally had uncovered how the Chinese Communist Party ruled. The editorial board was expanded to twenty people, and the group sponsored debates and seminars.
The Journal was closed down in April 1967. Yu Luoke began to write on economic inequality. In January 1968, he was arrested. Two years later, on 5 March 1970, Yu was executed by firing squad at Beijing Workers Stadium.
Book
Pastor Wang Yi's Anthology: Carrying the Cross - A History of Chinese Family Churches
Wang Yi, of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, is a well-known Chinese intellectual who later became a pastor. The Early Rain Reformed Church that he led was one of the most famous unregistered churches in China. The church occupied the floor of an office building in Chengdu and had its own bookstore, seminary, and pre-school. It regularly had services of hundreds of people. Later, the church had internal conflicts, while at the same time Wang became more outspoken in his criticism of the government. In 2018, he criticized Xi Jinping for abolishing term limits and allowing himself to become ruler of China for life. Pastor Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2019.
This book is based on the recordings of Pastor Wang's classes at Early Rain in 2018. The first five chapters were reviewed by Pastor Wang himself, but he was arrested before he could complete the review of the last five chapters. The essays cover key issues that concerned Wang, including the role of the church in China as a city on the hill, the role of the Reform church in China, and the history of unregistered churches in China.
Book
Personal experiences of political movements
This book is a collection of many authors, most of whom were former senior officials of the Communist Party of China, such as Li Rui, Xiao Ke and others. Through the author's recollections, we can learn about the political movements of the Mao Zedong era, including the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement, etc., as well as the details of many unjust cases, such as the Hu Feng case, which is quite convincing. This book was published by the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau Press in mainland China in 1998.
Book
Political Struggles in China's Reform Era
The author of this book, Yang Jisheng, is a veteran journalist with 35 years of experience in journalism at Xinhua News Agency, China's official news organization. He knows a great deal about the ups and downs of Chinese politics after the end of the Cultural Revolution as well as the intricate power struggles at the top and has a lot of first-hand information. He personally interviewed Zhao Ziyang, Zhu Houze, Li Rui, Ren Zhongyi, An Zhiwen, Tian Jiyun, and other important people. “Political Struggles in China's Reform Era”, first published in Hong Kong in November 2004, was the subject of a series of crackdowns by the authorities against Yang Jisheng. It was republished in 2010 by Hong Kong's Cosmo Books.
Article
Poppies under the Red Sun: The Opium Trade and the Yan'an Model
In the 1990s, history scholar Chen Yongfa made a fundamental study of the opium economy two decades before the founding of the CCP and completed a monograph, "Poppies under the Red Sun: The Opium Trade and the Yan'an Model". Since then, more and more research articles have been written on the subject, and new information has appeared. Subsequently, the phenomenon of the opium economy of the CCP's Yan'an regime has also became an important field of study.
Film and Video
Postcard
After retiring from her job as a cadre, Wang Lihong fulfilled what she saw as her civic responsibility to become more active in women’s rights in China, especially the protection of their legal rights. In 2009-2010, she became involved in the “Fujian Netizen Case,” which resulted in the arrest of three human rights activists, who all sought to investigate the death of a 25-year-old women believed to have been murdered in a gang rape by men associated with the local police. Wang Lihong wrote letters to the General Secretary of the Fujian Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China every day for nine consecutive days, calling on the authorities to let them go home for the New Year. For this reason, she was criminally detained by the authorities in March 2011 on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." The case was heard by the Beijing, Chaoyang District People's Court on August 12; nearly a month later, on September 9, the court issued a guilty verdict and sentenced Wang Lihong to nine months in prison. The film documents her case, and raises questions about the accountability of the local government and police. Another one of Ai Xiaoming’s films, “Let the Sunshine Reach the Earth,” documents Wang Lihong’s trial process in more detail.
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Book
Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang
“The Course of Reform”, a memoir by Zhao Ziyang, former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was published on May 29, 2009 by New Century Press in Hong Kong. Its English translation, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang” was published on May 13 before that. According to the book's preface, in 1992, Du Guanzheng, an old subordinate of Zhao Ziyang and former director of the State Press and Publication Administration, together with Xiao Hongda, another former high-ranking CCP official, persuaded Zhao Ziyang, who was under house arrest, to organize his experiences into a book.
Purchase link: https://www.kobo.com/hk/zh/ebook/ZoerWPfG8TiqoXIYwvW2iw.
Film and Video
Ram
The documentary "Ram" was filmed by independent director Tiger Temple in 2016 and is available here in a revised version by the author in 2021. The film documents a real-life incident that took place in Xi'an during the "1983 crackdown". The encounter of the artist Gong Yang (real name Li Xiaoming), the main character of the documentary, is quite representative. It reflects the cruelty and absurdity of the "1983 Crackdown" political campaign launched under the direction of Deng Xiaoping.
Film and Video
Red Art
This documentary interviews painters, Red Guards, as well as current collectors and researchers in China and the United Kingdom. It presents the emergence, spread, and impact of the propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution. The film includes interviews with Liu Chunhua, the author of Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, Guangzhou painter Li Xingtao, Guangzhou old Red Guard Zhou Jineng, and others. Art museum personnels, art critics, journalists, professors, and researchers in both China and the United Kingdom speak about their understanding of the art of the Cultural Revolution from various perspectives.
This film is in Chinese with both English and Chinese subtitles.
book
Return of the Soul from Purgatory: Memoirs of a Survivor of the "Sparks" Case from the Great Famine Era
In 1960, a group of faculty and students from Lanzhou University, who had been labeled Rightists and sent down to rural areas in Tianshui, Gansu, personally experienced the Great Famine. They self-published <i>Spark</i> magazine to expose and criticize the totalitarian rule that led to this catastrophe.<i>Spark</i> only published one issue before its participants were arrested and labeled as a counterrevolutionary group. Many were sentenced to long prison terms, and some were even executed. <a href=“http://108.160.154.72/s/china-unofficial/item/1759#lg=1&slide=0”>The first issue of <i>Spark</i> and more information about the "Spark Case" can be read here</a>.
<i>Return from Purgatory: A Survivor’s Memoir of the ‘Spark Case’ in the Great Famine Years (1957–1981)</i> is the autobiography of Xiang Chengjian, a key participant in <i>Spark</i> magazine. At the time, he and another student were responsible for printing the first issue, and he contributed six articles to <i>Spark</i>. Due to his involvement, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the Spark case and was not rehabilitated until the early 1980s.
This memoir is divided into three sections, with a total of thirteen chapters spanning over 350,000 characters. It documents Xiang’s journey from being labeled a Rightist and sent to perform forced labor, to his arrest and 19-year imprisonment for his involvement in <i>Spark</i>, and finally to his struggle for rehabilitation and efforts to rebuild his life after release. In the book’s preface, scholar Ai Xiaoming offers the following assessment:
"Xiang Chengjian’s memoir holds significant value for the study of the intellectual history of contemporary China. First, it serves as another important testimony of the “Spark Case”, following Tan Chanxue’s memoir <i><a href=“”>Sparks: A Chronicle of the Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group at Lanzhou University</a></i>, making it a crucial historical document on this act of resistance. The author reconstructs the social context before and after the case and describes how the young intellectuals behind <i>Spark</i> bravely challenged totalitarian rule. Second, the book provides a detailed account of labor camps in western China, with the author documenting his 18 years of forced labor in Gansu and Qinghai, unveiling a western chapter of China’s Gulag system. Third, it is a deeply personal intellectual history of a resister, showing the immense suffering, trials of life and death, and personal resilience under the crushing force of state violence."
The book’s appendix includes Xiang Chengjian’s six articles for <i>Spark</i>, an in-depth investigative report on him by journalist Jiang Xue, and a chronological record of the Spark Case compiled by Ai Xiaoming.
<i>Return from Purgatory</i> is published by Borden Press in New York and is the first book in the “People’s Archives Series”, published by the China Unofficial Archives. The author, Xiang Chengjian, has generously authorized the archive to share the book’s digital edition. Readers are encouraged to purchase the book to support the author and publisher.
Book
Revisiting 1957
<i>Revisiting 1957</i> is not just about the history of the Anti-Rightist Campaign but is also a theoretical reflection on that history. Written by Wei Zidan (the penname for Wei Liyan), the book has three sections: upper, in which the author discusses philosophical problems of the campaign; middle, in which he discusses the origins of the campaign; and lower, which contains his thoughts on lessons for the future. In Wei's view, the people who were declared rightists stood up for freedom of speech. The campaign, therefore, was an assault on freedom of expression and resulted in a human rights catastrophe for China. The book also has an eleven-part appendix with reflections on miscellaneous events.
Wei Zidan was born in Henan Province in 1933 and was a teacher in the Anyang Middle School. He himself was labeled a rightist and brings a unique insider's account of the movement but unlike some personal accounts of suffering, Wei also brings a more analytical approach to the issue.
After moving to the United States in his later years, he collected information and found the freedom to complete this book. Published in Hong Kong in 2013 by the May 7 Society Press.
Book
Rise and Fall of the Red Guards: A Handbook of the Old Red Guards at Tsinghua High School
The Red Guard movement originated in the Tsinghua University Affiliated High School, a secondary school for faculty and staff of the university, as well as others aspiring to attend the elite university, including the sons and daughters of high-ranking cadres. Song Bailin was a senior high school student at Tsinghua High School, one of the founders and a core member of the Red Guards.
Song kept a diary during the first years of the Cultural Revolution. Yu Ruxin, a researcher of the Cultural Revolution, felt that a section of Song Berlin's diary involving the Red Guards of Tsinghua High School was of historical value. Yu decided to publish the diary in its entirety as it was, with no deletion except for the correction of obvious typos. The diary covers the period from May 1966 to February 1968, the launching phase of the Cultural Revolution. A selection of diary entries from January to April 1966 has been included to give a better understanding of the political climate in China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as well as the ideological trends of high school students.
Because the diary is a historic document directly from an era that is now more than half a century old, the diary lacks historical background and footnotes that might help current readers understand the context of that time. Fortunately, the current publication has a preface written by Luo Xiaohai, who explains the political atmosphere in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution and some of the key events of that time.
For readers today, the diaries are at times hard to decipher. The Red Guards quickly were criticized by others, including those in power. As the writer Hu Ping notes <a href="https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/pinglun/huping/Hu_ping-20071112.html">in a 2007 review of the book</a>, the reversal of support for the Red Guards must have caused confusion and even a sense of betrayal by many involved. The diary, however, reveals none of this inner turmoil, Hu Ping ascribes the Red Guards' silence to the fact that keeping a diary in that era was a way for participants to prove their revolutionary zeal. Thus they self-censored and wrote with the expectation that their words would be discovered and could be used against them. This means the diary provides little in the way of psychological insights in the Red Guards.
It does, however, provide a way of understanding how totalitarian terror and power works on individual psychology. Thus when his classmates beat classmates and teachers, Song expressed embarrassment that he lacked their fervor and did not participate. This means that the diary is best seen as a primary document that shows the way young people thought at that time, rather than an exercise in self-reflection or criticism.
Book
Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Revolution
Professor Chen Yongfa's book examines the history of the Chinese Communist Party from the perspective of modern Chinese history. It divides it into three stages: revolutionary seizure of power, continuous revolution, and farewell revolution. It delves into three major issues in CCP history: nationalism, grassroots power structure, and ideological transformation and control. published by Taiwan's Linking Publishing in 2001.
Film and Video
Spark
<i>Spark</i> tells the story of a group of young intellectuals who risked their lives to voice their opinions about the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957, many intellectuals were branded as Rightists and banished to work and live in rural China. A group of students from Lanzhou University were among those sent to the countryside. There, they witnessed mass famine which resulted from government policies to collectivize agriculture and force industrialization in rural China. Shocked and angered by the government’s lack of response to the Great Famine, these students banded together to publish <i>Spark</i>, an underground magazine that sought to alert the Chinese population of the unfolding famine. The first issue, printed in 1960, included poems and articles analyzing the root causes of failed policies. However, as the first issue of <i>Spark</i> was mailed and the second issue was edited, many of these students, along with locals who supported the team, were arrested. Some of the key members of the publication were sentenced to life imprisonment and later executed, while others spent decades in labor camps.
In this 2014 documentary, Hu Jie uncovers the stories of the people involved in the publication of <i>Spark</i>. He conducts interviews with former members of the magazine who survived persecution, and also shows footage of the manuscripts of the magazine. A digital copy of the original manuscript of the first volume of <i>Spark</i> is also held on our website.
This film was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Chinese Documentary at the 2014 Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival and the Award of Excellence in the Asian Competition. Later, it won the Independent Spirit Award at the Beijing Independent Film Festival.
Periodicals
Spark, Issue 1
<i>Spark</i> was an underground magazine that appeared in the Tianshui area of Gansu Province in northwestern China during the 1959-1961 Great Famine. The magazine was lost for decades but in the late 1990s began to be republished electronically, becoming the basis of documentary films, essays, and books.
In 1959, the Great Famine was spreading across China. It was witnessed by a group of Lanzhou University students who had been branded as Rightists and sent down to labor in the rural area of Tianshui. They saw countless peasants dying of hunger, and witnessed cannibalism.
Led by Zhang Chunyuan, a history student at Lanzhou University, they founded <i>Spark</i> in the hope of alerting people to the unfolding disaster and analyzing its root causes. The students pooled their money to buy a mimeograph machine, carved their own wax plates, and printed the first issue. The thirty-page publication featured Lin Zhao's long poem, "A Day in Prometheus's Passion." The first issue also featured articles, such as "The Current Situation and Duty," which dissected the tragic situation of society at that time and hoped that the revolution would be initiated by the Communist Party from within.
The students planned to send the magazine to the leaders of the provinces and cities with a view to correcting their mistakes. But before the first issue of Spark was mailed and while the second issue was still being edited, on September 30, 1960, these students in Wushan and Tianshui were arrested, along with dozens of local peasants who knew and supported them. Among them: Zhang Chunyuan was sentenced to life imprisonment and later executed; Du Yinghua, deputy secretary of the Wushan County Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for having interacted with the students, and later executed. Lin Zhao was detained and also executed. Other key members, such as Gu Yan, Tan Chanxue, and Xiang Chengjian, were all sentenced to long years in labor camps.
In the 1990s, Tan Chanxue devoted herself to researching historical information and figures to bring this history to life. She found in her personnel file (<i>dan'an</i>）photographs of the magazine, as well as self-confessions and other evidence used in the students' trial. Eventually, the photos were collated into PDFs, which began to circulate around China.
Editors' note: This site the original handwritten version and a PDF of all the articles from the first issue of <i>Spark</i>. We will also make available transcripts of the essays in Chinese and are searching for volunteers to translate the texts into English. Please contact us if you're interested in helping!
Book
Summer of 1957: From One Hundred Schools of Thought to Two Schools of Thought
This book comprehensively records and analyzes the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
The author Zhu Zheng was born in 1931. He was once the editor of Hunan People's Publishing House and a well-known expert on Lu Xun in China. He was classified as a Rightist in 1957 and personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign. This book references information from CCP party newspapers at that time, as well as his recollections, making this book informative and reliable.
The "two dueling schools of thought" in the subtitle of this book comes from The Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Mao called for one hundred schools of thought to contend but in fact only intended for two to compete: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
This book was first published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1998. It is one of the earliest studies of the movement in China.
Film and Video
Taishi Village
In the fall of 2005, residents of Taishi Village became increasingly frustrated and angered by the sale of land by village officials; hundreds of villagers signed a petition calling for the removal of the village chief. The villagers occupied the village committee’s financial office and expressed their demands through sit-ins and other forms of protests. The government dispatched the police to arrest village activists, but the villagers insisted on starting a formal recall process. The government finally sent a team to the village to verify the signatures for the petition.
<i>The Taishi Village</i> recall incident generated attention from Chinese and foreign media, and caused uneasiness among local government officials. On September 12, 2005, police arrested dozens of villagers who were participating in a sit-in in the village committee room. Despite the pressure, villagers elected a committee to remove the village committee director. The government then dispatched more men to exert pressure, forcing elected members to withdraw one by one. Hired patrol teams eventually drove lawyers and reporters out of the village.
This documentary records the protest scenes and tragic ending of Taishi village’s movement for autonomy, and presents the surging rights consciousness in rural areas in Guangdong. This incident demonstrates villagers’ ability to exercise their right to vote and the government’s inertial approach to grassroots democracy movements.
This documentary is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Book
Ten Years of War: A Memoir of Sino-Soviet Relations 1956-1966
The author of this book explains the relations between the two parties before and after the 1956-1966 Sino-Soviet War and the main process of the Sino-Soviet War as a first-hand witness. Since Stalin's death and Khrushchev's rise to power, Sino-Soviet relations have been characterized by a series of exchanges over the internal relations between the socialist party and the socialist country, the relations with the "imperialists", how to build socialism, and the national question. As a personal witness to this period, the author tells the truth about history as he knows it. This book was originally published on the mainland in 1993.
Book
The Collected Works of He Jiadong
He Jiadong is a Chinese publisher. He joined the Chinese Communist Party at an early age. After 1949, he founded the Workers' Publishing House, one of the propaganda mouthpieces of the CCP. In 1957, he was designated as a rightist and later labeled as an anti-Party element. In 1965, Kang Sheng criticized him. He was sent down to Chengwu County in Shandong Province, where he was put under local control for 14 years. During the Cultural Revolution, he was taken back to Beijing and criticized, which affected his family and led to the unnatural death of his mother and two sons. In 1979, after the rightist was corrected and completely rehabilitated, he became the executive vice-president and deputy editor-in-chief of the Workers' Publishing House; in 1983, he founded the monthly <i>Rensheng (Life)</i>. In 1984, he founded <i>Kaituo (Pioneering)</i> magazine. He was investigated for publishing Liu Binyan's <i>The Second Kind of Loyalty</i>, and resigned from his post in 1985. The above weekly newspapers, bimonthly magazines and websites were all suspended and closed by the authorities. He has written a large number of articles exploring China's development path from the end of authoritarianism to constitutional democracy. He himself had a 60-year career as a "red publisher" but never had the freedom to publish. Even his own collection of essays was never published. Until the end of his life, he never saw a printed volume of his essays—the printed books were seized and confiscated by the Chinese authorities.
The book can be purchased <a href="https://www.fellowspress.com/shop1/p/-4"> link</a>.
Book
The Doubtful Clouds of 1957-- Cracking the Code of the Anti-Rightist Movement
The Anti-Rightist Movement in China began in 1957 with the reorganization of intellectuals, followed by the Great Leap Forward, the People's Commune, and a series of calamities such as the Great Famine. The Hong Kong Five Sevens Society was founded in 2007 with the aim of collecting, organizing, and researching historical information about the Anti-Rightist Movement. It is headed by Wu Yisan, a writer who moved to Hong Kong from mainland China. The author of this book, Shen Yuan, who was also a Rightist at the time. He has systematically researched and organized the Anti-Rightist Movement that took place in 1957 and attempted to answer some of the unanswered questions.