Dali Brigade of Huangli People's Commune, Feidong County, Anhui Province, has twelve production teams. According to incomplete statistics, of the 868 people in 180 households before the disaster, 381 people died in the famine, and the death population spread over 139 households, of which 22 households were entirely annihilated. The author, Guan Zhongcun, who was only 10 years old at the time, was also orphaned during the famine. This article records the names, ages, and families of the 381 people who died.
In 1959, out of 120 people in Wu Weizi Squad of Gao Dadian Brigade, Shili Commune, Guangshan County, Henan Province, 72 people died of starvation. Author Wu Yongkuan witnessed the deaths of his father and his fellow villagers. His son, Wu Ye, collected and organized a list of the dead, and readers can see that, at that time, 58% of the people in that small village died of starvation, and 63% of families died off with no descendants.
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.
This book concerns two Chinese economists, Xue Mingjian and Sun Yefang. Xue Mingjian (1895-1980, former name Xue Epei, he changed his name after joining the volunteer student armies during the 1911 revolution - Mingjian (明剑) meant “to eliminate the Qing government with sword and revenge on behalf of the Ming Dynasty (剑除满清,为朱明报复)” ) was "the founder of modern Chinese national enterprise economics, the pioneer of modern national industry, a civil society activist, educator and scholar" (author's preface). He served as a delegate to the National People's Congress of the Republic of China, Senate member of the Kuomintang, and a popularly elected legislator. Sun Yefang (1908-1983, former name Xue Eguo, he changed his name out of security concern after the incident that he got arrested by KMT when he was a underground CCP member), by contrast, a member of the Communist Party of China, was an important economist in post-1949 China, who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and regained attention and respect after the reform and opening-up period. The author tells the story of the two brothers' very different life trajectories, while pointing out that even though they were in different political camps, their concern for and practice of humanitarianism were in fact the same.
The book was first published by China SDX Joint Publishing in 2009, and was to be reprinted by Economic Press China in 2014, but it was censored. The version in our archive is published by Boden House in 2023.
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>.
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.
This movie records how Zhang Xianzhi went from being a soldier to a prisoner and then to an independent writer. His experience and thought process is compared with that of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn. The title of the film is taken from the title of Zhang Xianzhi's book <i>Anecdotes from the Gulag</i>, which takes the viewer on a journey to China's Gulag Archipelago, a labor camp in Sichuan. The extreme conditions and little-known tragic history of the camp are presented. The movie is 42 minutes long and was filmed in 2012.
The author, Wu Yue, was the editor of several media including Yuwen Chubanshe. This book, as his memoir, recreates his personal destiny in different social situations, including the anti-rightist and Cultural Revolution and other special times, the frustrations of a generation of intellectuals held hostage in the political wave. The book tells the story of the author's many marriages and love affairs under special political circumstances. It also analyzes the deformity and absurdity of the political re-education through the labor system as well as the impact on humanity.
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.
The Great Famine in China in the 1960s was a rare famine in human history. From 1958 to 1962, according to incomplete statistics, 36 million people died of starvation in China; due to starvation the birthrate is estimated to have dropped to around 40 million. The number of people who died of starvation and the lowered birthrate due to starvation totaled more than 70 million, which is not only the largest number of deaths among all the disasters that occurred in China's history, but also the most painful and unprecedented tragedy in the history of mankind today. Was this a natural disaster or a man-made disaster? Officials deliberately covered it up and tried to minimize it, forbid any public discussion or expression about it. Yang Jisheng, a senior reporter of Xinhua News Agency, personally experienced the death of his father in the famine. Since then, he has devoted his heart and soul to this story. He has spent several years on it, running through a dozen or so provinces where the disaster was the most serious, and personally checking countless archives and records, both public and secret. He has interviewed the people involved and checked the evidence over and over again. Thus, he felt confident that he could, with the heart of the historical pen and the conscience of the news reporter, make a number of drafts, and truly recapture this tragic history of the human race and analyze the causes of this tragedy with a large amount of facts and data. With a wealth of facts and figures, he identifies the main cause of the famine as the totalitarian system. This is a book carries the collective memory of many ordinary Chinese people, and is a tombstone for the 36 million victims.
This book is published by Tiandi Books in Hong Kong. The English version of <i>Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 </i> was translated by American author Stacy Mosher and can be purchased <a href= "https://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Great-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962/dp/0374533997">here</a>.
Gao Hua was a renowned Chinese historian who died of liver cancer in Nanjing in 2011 at the age of 57. During his lifetime, Prof. Gao Hua focused on modern Chinese history. He was an expert in the history of the CCP and Mao Zedong. Several of his books were published overseas, and his book “The Revolutionary Years” was the only one published on the mainland. His masterpiece, “How the Red Sun Rises - The Ins and Outs of the Yan'an Rectification Movement”, was considered a classic work on CCP history when it was published in Hong Kong, but it soon became a banned book. Through this documentary, director Hu Jie records Gao Hua's voice and laughter during his lifetime, expressing the deep feelings of people mourning and commemorating Gao Hua.
Traditionally, the western Sichuan plain was known as China's "Land of Abundance," but it became a focal point of the Great Famine of 1959-1961. Sichuan was one of the hardest-hit areas, with the largest number of deaths from starvation in the country and one of the highest death rates.
The title of the book, "Apricot Blossoms and Wheat Seedlings" is taken from a popular revolutionary song of the Mao era. In March, 1958, the Communist Party held a central work conference (known as the Chengdu Conference) at the Jinniu Dam Guest House near Chengdu, during which Mao Zedong inspected the Hongguang (Shining Red) Commune in nearby Pixian County. Two songs were written to commemorate that occasion.. One was "Red Flowers Bloom in the Shining Red Commune," and the other was "Apricot Blossoms and Wheat Seedlings."
The author of this book, Dong Fu (the pen name of Wang Dongyu), was born in Wenjiang, in the western Sichuan plains. He belonged to the "lao san jie"--students whose education was disrupted during the Cultural Revolution. His father was a veteran CCP cadre who engaged in underground party work and who later was responsible for economic policies. As a youth and as a soldier during the Great Leap Forward in Sichuan, Dong Fu saw the famine first-hand. During the Cultural Revolution he enlisted in the army and worked as a reporter for the Chengdu Military District's Zhanqi News.
After graduating from college, he began to work on this history. He was able to draw on his father's connections to research the book, in the 1980s and 1990s interviewing retired officials who knew his father and who could confide in him. Many have since passed away, giving this book great historical value. He was also able to collect extensive material from historical archives, also in part due to his father's and his own personal connections to the region.
This book was published by the Tianyuan Bookstore in Hong Kong in 2008 on the 50th anniversary of the start of the famine (some historians date the famine from 1958-1962, others from 1959-1961). In contrast to macro accounts of the Great Famine, such as Yang Jisheng's “Tombstone” (https://main--minjian-danganguan.netlify.app/collection/%E6%9D%A8%E7%BB%A7%E7%BB%B3-%E2%80%93-%E5%A2%93%E7%A2%91%EF%BC%9A%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E5%85%AD%E5%8D%81%E5%B9%B4%E4%BB%A3%E5%A4%A7%E9%A5%A5%E8%8D%92%E7%BA%AA%E5%AE%9E) or Frank Dikötter's
“Mao's Great Famine” (https://www.frankdikotter.com/books/maos-great-famine/), Dong Fu's work is a case study of the famine in one area. By focusing on the western plains around Chengdu, the author shows how Mao's policies destroyed agricultural life in even historically rich areas that in normal times are China's breadbaskets.
Another feature of this book is its writing style. In reviewing this book in 2009, the theorist Hu Ping notes that history writing in China was shaken up by William Manchester's “The Glory and the Dream”, which was published in China in 1979. It was a vividly written history of the United States between 1932 and 1972 that showed that history could be engaging and entertaining. Hu Ping sees Dong Fu's work as inspired by Manchester's work, giving a panoramic, deftly written account suitable for the general reader, but based on solid research. Dong Fu weaves in the top-level battles with ordinary people's views, as well as social and cultural history. He mines the archives for telling details, such as complaints that people filed with the government, witty jingles that they composed to express their pain, and folk traditions. Hu Ping, who also grew up in the same region around the same time, writes:
"During the years of the Great Leap Forward, I was in primary school and junior high school in Chengdu. Reading the relevant chapters of Dong Fu's book, I felt very close to it, and many people and events from that year came vividly to mind. This feeling is something I have never experienced when reading other books about the Great Leap Forward period—whether they are theory books, history books, or even literature books." (https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/zhuanlan/shuwenpingjian/huping-05062009153055.html)
Author Xin Hao Nian tries to analyze the modern history of China since the Xinhai Revolution. He pointsout that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a restoration of the authoritarian system, and the Republic of China (ROC) represents China's road to a republic. The first volume of the book defends and clarifies the history of the Kuomintang (KMT), arguing that the KMT is not a "reactionary faction" as claimed by the CCP. The second volume criticizes the revolution and history of the CCP. The book was first printed in 1999 by Blue Sky Publishing House (USA) and reprinted in June 2012 by Hong Kong's Schaefer International Publishing. It is banned on the mainland.
This book was published by Lanzhou University Press in 2004. The author, Xing Tongyi, once served as deputy director of Gansu People's Broadcasting Station and director of the Standing Committee of the Jiuquan Municipal People's Congress.
Jiabiangou Farm is a farm located on the edge of the Badain Jaran Desert in Jiuquan, Gansu Province, about 30 kilometers northeast of Jiuquan City. It became a labor camp in 1957. Before it was banned in October 1961, more than 3,000 intellectuals who were labeled as rightists were detained here. During the Great Famine, most of the intellectuals in farm labor camps died due to starvation and excessive workload. This is known as the Jiabiangou Incident. Jiabiangou has also become a symbol of the concentration camps where persecuted intellectuals were imprisoned.
Xing Tongyi was born in Tianshui, Gansu. He said that when he was young, he witnessed a neighbor named Guo being beaten as a rightist and sent to Jiabiangou Labor Camp. In 1961, he learned that this neighbor had starved to death in Jiabiangou. When he was in school at No. 1 Middle School in Tianshui City, his math teacher was Li Jinghang, a Christian who survived Jiabiangou. Xing Tongyi later served as a reporter and deputy director of Gansu Radio Station for a long time, and went to work in Jiuquan in 1996. After that, he took advantage of various opportunities to go deep into Jiabiangou and some surrounding labor reform farms. By consulting a large number of historical materials, he interviewed dozens of rightists who had undergone labor reform in Jiabiangou, or the children of these rightists. It took eight years to complete this book.
Unlike Yang Xianhui's novelistic description of Jiabiangou, Xing Tongyi's narrative is composed of interviews with the people involved and quotations from first-hand historical materials. According to Xing Tongyi, the historical materials he referred to include the Jiabiangou Farm's "Plan and Mission Statement" and the anti-rightist report of "Gansu Daily" in 1957. In addition to interviewing Jiabiangou survivors or their children, he also found information on more than 40 of the more than 2,000 rightists who were in labor camps at the time and were prosecuted by the Jiuquan County Procuratorate for resisting labor camps. After the book was published, people continued to provide him with historical materials, such as death notices and diaries of the victims.
How many labor camp inmates were there in Jiabiangou at that time? In order to clarify this issue, Xing Tongyi interviewed dozens of people, reviewed information, and also found Luo Zengfu, the production section chief of Jiabiangou Labor Camp, the only farm management cadre alive at the time. Based on the information provided by Luo Zengfu, Xing Tongyi's research concluded that there were a total of about 2,800 inmates in Jiabiangou Farm at that time, including about 2,500 rightists. This number is considered to be relatively accurate.
Chinese human rights activist Dr. Xu Zhiyong, twice imprisoned for his longstanding advocacy of civil society in China, was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Chinese government in April 2023. The documentary by independent director Lao Hu Miao was filmed over a four-year period, beginning with the seizure of the Public League Legal Research Center, which Xu Zhiyong helped found in 2009, and ending with Xu's first prison sentence in 2014.
The revised edition of this book was published by *Open Magazine* in Hong Kong in 2007. The first edition was published in 1991 and was revised and reprinted twice, in 1993 and 1995. The book collects a large amount of information about the anti-rightist movement, including survey interviews with victims of the anti-rightist movement and their relatives and friends. It is a complete record of the anti-rightist movement, which comprehensively analyzes and discusses the whole process of the anti-rightist movement, as well as its ins and outs, causes and consequences. Regarding the number of "rightists," the statistics of the CCP authorities had been limited to 550,000 people. According to Ding Lyric's analysis, there were about 1.2 million people who were labeled as "rightists" in the Anti-Rightist Movement.
In March 1989, the book Yangtze Yangtze was published by the Guizhou People's Publishing House just as the Tiananmen student protests were about to begin in Beijing. The book fed into this intellectual ferment, challenging the technocratic reasons for the Three Gorges Dam, which eventually would dam the Yangtze River in the name of flood control and electrical power generation.
The book was edited by the journalist Dai Qing, the daughter of a well-known Communist Party activist and leader. The book challenged the project's decision-making process, with a broad array of scientists, journalists, and intellectuals arguing that it was not democratic and did not take into account all viewpoints. It was widely read in China and translated into foreign languages.
After the Tiananmen protests were violently suppressed, Dai Qing was arrested and imprisoned for ten months in Qincheng Prison as an organizer of the uprising. Yangtze Yangtze was criticized as “promoting bourgeois liberalization, opposing the Four Fundamental Principles (of party control), and creating public opinion for turmoil and riots.” The book was taken off the shelves and destroyed, with some copies burned. It became the first banned book resulting from the decision-making process of the Three Gorges Project.
The book is banned in China. The English-language edition can be read online at Probe International: https://journal.probeinternational.org/three-gorges-probe/yangtze-yangtze/.