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.
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.
“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.
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.
<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.
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.
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.
South side Street near Tiananmen Square in Beijing has long been a gathering place for some homeless people as well as petitioners. The director became involved in the homeless relief charity in 2007, and continued to follow the film, which the director finished editing eight years later. The film was selected for the 12th China Independent Film Festival Documentary Competition.
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.
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.
Due to poverty in rural areas in Henan Province—part of China’s Central Plains—many farmers contracted AIDS by selling their blood. This documentary dives into the lives of these AIDS patients, depicting the manner in which they cope with life, officials’ responses, and the stories of volunteers who helped the infected villagers. The filmmaker visited several villages with high incidence of AIDS, interviewing and recording people’s accounts of how the “plasma economy” arose. This documentary presents the living condition of families and individuals, especially women and children, who contracted AIDS due to blood donation and blood transfusions, and demonstrates the formation of grassroots organizations.
This film is in Chinese with both Chinese and English subtitles.
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.
Li Rui, who once served as Mao's secretary, is also an expert on Mao Zedong. Like his famous <i>Proceedings of the Lushan Conference</i>, this book is also an important historical work. It focuses on the author's personal experience of the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong.
The documents in this book come from two high-level meetings of the CCP held after the June 4 Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989, namely, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Committee of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CCP and the Fourth Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which was held on June 23rd and 24th at the Beijing West Guest House. The author claims that the documents were copied and kept for many years by an unnamed senior official within the CCP. This set of documents was formed when the CCP made its final conclusions on the June 4 incident. It is also a record of the high-level political operations within the CCP. These documents reveal the ultimate secret of the mechanism by which the Communist Party has always held absolute power. It was published by New Century Press in 2019. Special thanks to Bao Pu, founder of Hong Kong's New Century Press and son of Bao Tong, former political secretary of Zhao Ziyang, for authorizing CUA to share the book.
<i>The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement</i> is a sociological monograph. It explains the process of the 1989 school movement and interprets the political and economic situation from four perspectives: state legitimacy, ecological environment and mobilization structure, discourse and modes of action, and public opinion. Author Zhao Dingxin interviewed 70 participants in the movement at the time. He also examined many little-known domestic documents. Thus, theory and evidence are closely intertwined.
The book won the 2002 Distinguished Book Award (Collective Action/Social Movements) and the 2001 Distinguished Book Award (Asian and Asian American) from the American Sociological Association.
It is published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.
Author Li Zhisui served as Mao's medical team leader and was the first director of the PLA's San 105 Hospital. This book is a memoir that he wrote. It details Li Zhisui's information from 1954, when he started as Mao's personal physician, to 1976, when Mao died, a period of 22 years. In his writing, Mao's private life is extremely absurd and touches on all aspects of the struggle against some of the CCP's personnel. After the book was published in Taiwan, it was completely banned on the mainland.
Originally written in English, the book was translated into English by Hongchao Dai, former head of the political science department at the University of Detroit, with a foreword by China expert Andrew James Nathan, and with Anne F. Thurston as an assistant editor. was published in English by Blue Lantern Books in 1994. The Chinese edition was translated from the English with the assistance of Shushan Liao and published by Taiwan Times Culture in 1994. Lee died in the United States in February 1995, six months after the book was published.
The author, Li Yuzhen, published this book in 1997. The contents are all taken from the declassified archives of the former Soviet Union. Almost all of the 205 documents in this book are published for the first time. The documents reveal the various dimensions of Moscow's relations with China from 1920 to 1925 as well as little-known inside stories. It shows that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the real decision-maker of the Comintern. This book shows the complex relationship between China and the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, and Moscow and the various political forces in the Chinese court from different perspectives. It provides important clues for the study of history.
Tang Degang is a historian and biographer who specializes in oral history. In the latter half of his life, he settled in the United States and taught at Columbia University and the City University of New York. In the field of history, he put forward the "Three Gorges Theory of History", which divides the change of Chinese social system into three major stages: feudalism, imperialism, and civil rule. The book was originally titled <i>Mao Zedong's Dictatorship, 1949~1976</i>, but was renamed <i>Thirty Years of New China </i> when it was released on the mainland.
On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old vice principal of the Girls High School affiliated with Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death. The murder was by some of her students, a group of female Red Guards from the school. Bian was the first educator to be killed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. The night Bian was killed, Deng Xiaoping's two daughters, Deng Nan and Deng Rong, found Bian's husband and told him that they could only say that Bian died of high blood pressure due to illness, but not that Bian was killed. In the end, no one was criminally prosecuted.
This film is widely regarded as one of Hu Jie's most famous for its portrayal of Bian's husband, Wang Jingyao, and his efforts to document his wife's murder.
Follow director Hu Jie on his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@jiehu6613">YouTube channel</a>.