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Book
First Man against the Cultural Revolution and His Co-Conspirators, The
On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a "rightist" in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles", and authoritarianism and tyranny. He was arrested on November 26 of that year. Four months later, he was executed for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this book, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail his brother Liu Wenhui's ideology as well as how he was killed by the tyrannical government.
Official Documents
Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History, The
Feng Ke collaborated with Zhou Xun of the University of Hong Kong to collect information on the Great Famine. Zhou selected 121 items from the official archives to publish "The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History." Many of the archives they accessed at the time have since been classified again and are not available.
Book
Great Power Sinking: A Memo to China, A
This book is a collection of political essays by Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. It is a sister volume to *Single-Edged Poisoned Sword - A Critique of Contemporary Nationalism in China*, which covers many aspects of Chinese politics, including: one-party dictatorship, powerful capitalism, rights defense, June Fourth, and nationalism.
Book
Gu Zhun Diary
This book contains the only three surviving diaries of Gu Zhun: one from October 1959 to January 1960 when he was exile to work in a labor camp in Shangcheng, Henan Province, one from October 1969 to September 1971 when he was sent to work in the May Seventh Cadre School in Xi County, Henan Province, and one from October 1972 to October 1974 when he returned to Beijing. The first two diaries, written during the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, record the tragedies Gu Zhun witnessed during the Great Famine as well as his own endurance of hunger, and how he underwent repeated punishment and ideological education as a Rightist. The third diary is a simple record of his life, but it shows that Gu Zhun spent the last two years of his life almost exclusively in reading, translating and writing. Since he personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, these three diaries are considered a valuable source of information about these historical events. In addition to Gu Zhun's diary, the book includes Gu Zhun's translation manuscript of a chapter on Christianity in English political scientist George Catlin’s book *A History of Political Philosophers* published in 1939. The book also includes his last letter to his sixth brother Chen Minzhi, several articles by other people commemorating Gu Zhun, and interviews with Gu Zhun's close friends. The book was published by the Economic Daily Press in 1997.
Book
History of the Rural People's Commune
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.
Book
Hu Yaobang and the Vindication of Wrongful Convictions.
This book recounts Hu Yaobang's efforts to overturn people falsely accused of being "Rightists" during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s. It is written by Dai Huang (1928-2016， formerly known as Dai Shulin), a Communist propagandist and later senior editor at the Xinhua News Agency, who was also persecuted in the Mao era and rehabilitated thanks to Hu's efforts.
This means that the book is not entirely objective–Dai does not analyze too closely Hu's history of slavishy following Mao's policies. Instead, he aims to capture the excitement felt by the hundreds of thousands who suffered in the Mao era and who were rehabilitated in the 1970s and '80s thanks to Hu. At 300,000 Chinese characters, or more than 200,000 English words, it is a weighty compendium that includes previously unreported details of famous public intellectuals and party members persecuted by the party and how Hu rehabilitated them. For example, Dai recounts the case of Ge Peiqi, who was a Communist Party spy who was toppled for his opposition to the party's corruption and privilege. Dai explains the case in depth and how Ge was eventually cleared.
Dai represented a liberal wing of the party that believed in the need for the party to address its mistakes. At his funeral people such as Du Daozheng (the editor of China Through the Ages 炎黄春秋) and Tie Liu (publisher of the alternative history journal 往事微痕) attended. The book also contains a preface by Li Rui, who participated in China Through the Ages and was also a mainstay of the party's liberal wing.
Book
In Search of Cannibal Witnesses
This book is part of author Eva's "Famine Trilogy." Because her mother was a survivor of the famine in Gansu, Eva has obsessively pursued and recorded that tragic history. She visited a dozen counties in Gansu and Shaanxi four times and interviewed two hundred and fifty people. The list of starving victims recorded in the book is about eight hundred and thirty, while as many as one hundred and twenty-one incidents of cannibalism and cannibalistic phenomena were recorded.
Book
In Search of Famine Survivors
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.
电影及视频
In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul
Hu Jie narrates the life of Lin Zhao, a Christian dissident who was condemned as a Rightist in the late 1950s and executed during the Cultural Revolution. Prior to becoming a mentcritic of the government, Lin Zhao was an ardent believer of communism. She demonstrated talent in writing and speaking as a star student in Peking University. However, after criticizing the government in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, she was cast as anti-revolutionary. Despite the government’s attempts to silence her, Lin Zhao continued to speak and write publicly, including contributing two epic poems to Spark, an underground student-run journal. In 1960, she was arrested, and despite being released briefly in 1962, spent the rest of her life behind bars, under extremely poor living conditions. Nevertheless, she continued to write in prison, sometimes with her blood. In 1968, at the age of 36, she was executed by a firing squad.
In this documentary, Hu Jie showcases many of Lin Zhao’s surviving writings and poetry. These pieces often contain criticisms of the communist regime, as well as commentary on policy issues pertaining to labor and land reform. In making this film, Hu Jie traveled around China to interview friends and associates of Lin Zhao, who knew her as a student, activist, or prisoner. This documentary includes excerpts from interviews with them, which inform us about Lin Zhao’s personality and motivations.
This documentary has contributed to a widespread revival of interest in Lin Zhao, who had almost become a forgotten figure until the film’s appearance.
Book
In Search of the Fleeing Women and Children
This book is part of writer Eva's "Famine Trilogy." It is also the only oral history monograph on women and children who fled the famine in Gansu and Shaanxi from 1958 to 1963 as of now. More than 1.3 million people starved to death in Gansu Province, the hardest-hit area of the Great Famine, and more than 100,000 women between the ages of 16 - 15 years old fled the famine and left Gansu. What happened to them and their children is one of the most tragic memories of the Great Famine.
Film and Video
Jiabiangou Elegy: Life and Death of the Rightists
A five-part documentary by the filmmaker and feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming on the persecution of inmates at the Jiabiangou labor camp in Jiuquan, Gansu province, where more than 2,000 people died. The movie includes interviews with the few remaining survivors and documents efforts to commemorate the dead. The director interviewed survivors of Jiabiangou and the children of the victims and listened to their stories about the past; she also found former correctional officers and their descendants to understand the causes of labor camps and the Great Famine from different angles.
Shot by Ai and a team of volunteers, the film presents the conflict between the preservation and destruction of memory.
Book
Jin Qiao Lu Man
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.
Book
Li Yizhe Incident - A Bottom-Up Appeal for Democracy and the Rule of Law in the Cultural Revolution
Li Yizhe is the signature of a famous large-print newspaper, “About Socialist Democracy and the Rule of Law,” during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. The newspaper was co-authored by three people: Li Zhengtian, a student at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts; Chen Yiyang, a high school student; and Wang Xizhe, a factory worker. The name Li Yizhe was created with characters taken from each of the three names.
"Li Yizhe" wrote three drafts from September 13, 1973 to November 7, 1974. On November 10, 1974, the newspaper was publicly posted on the streets of Guangzhou, with a total of sixty-seven sheets of white paper and more than 26,000 words. The content called for socialist democracy and the rule of law, in the form of a critique of the "Lin Biao system." It pointed directly at the shortcomings of the CCP's ultra-leftist movement that had trampled on democracy and the rule of law since the founding of the CCP. The newspaper pointed out that the social and historical conditions under which Lin Biao's group emerged reflected the ideology of China's feudal society, which had lasted for more than 2,000 years, and that the essence of Lin Biao's counter-revolutionary group reflected the ideology of the extreme left. Without naming names, the broadsheet also pointed out the many crimes of those in power and, in connection with these phenomena, analyzed the serious problems of the socialist "system" itself. Li Yizhe and others were arrested in 1977 and rehabilitated a year later.
Book
Life of Storms: The New Life of a Disabled Prisoner, A
On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a Rightist in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles," authoritarianism, and tyranny. Liu was arrested on November 26 of that year. Four months later, he was executed for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this autobiography, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail not only Liu Wenhui's ideology but also how he was killed by the tyrannical government.
Book
Lin Zhao Anthology
The Lin Zhao Anthology contains nearly one hundred of Lin Zhao's works, including essays, poems, commentaries, and news reports written since her middle school years, as well as all of Lin Zhao's manuscripts and letters that were written in prison and later returned to her family. The collection was edited and compiled by Lin Zhao's friends Tan Chanxue (see separate entry) and Ni Jingxiong, and printed into a book on their own. Most of Lin Zhao’s manuscripts written in her blood in prison were typed on computer by Tan Chanxue. This anthology is the most important historical material used by Prof. Lian Xi of Duke University for his research and writing of the book "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China."
Book
Lushan meeting factual record
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.
Book
Man-Made Disasters: The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine.
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).
Book
Mao in Power (1949-1976)
The author of this book, Shan Shaojie, is a scholar from mainland China. For several years, he wrote this book from an independent position. Former political secretary of Mao Zedong, Li Rui, and Princeton University professor, Yu Yingshi, wrote the foreword for this book. In addition to a systematic account of the Maoist era, Shan Shaojie's book "Mao in Power" emphasizes that almost all members of the Communist Party's highest decision-making echelons, with the exception of Mao Zedong, made efforts, in varying degrees and successively, to stop Mao's insanity. Moreover, they took turns to resist and ultimately to leave Mao alone, but did not really stop Mao's madness. This book was published by Linking Publishing in 2001 and has been reprinted several times.
Book
Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution: an interpretation of political psychology and cultural genes
This book systematically explores the mental world of Mao Zedong, and his followers (including Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, and Zhang Chunqiao). According to the author, it involves lust, political fantasies, and other pathologies. The book analyzes how these subconscious thoughts underlay the history of the Cultural Revolution.