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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
Science, Democracy, Rationality: Xu Liangying's Anthology
Chinese intellectual Xu Liangying is a scholar of the history of scientific thought and an active warrior in defense of human rights. He weathered China's most extreme political storms and began to speak out again after China opened up slightly in 1977. This book collects his political speeches between 1977-1999. Originally published by Spiegel Publishing in Hong Kong in 2001, the book was later made into a PDF version by Xu Liangying's family in the hope that it would be circulated online to a wider audience.
Film and Video
South Side Street
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.
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
Sparks: A Chronicle of the Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group at Lanzhou University
During the worst years of the 1960 famine, a group of teachers and students at Lanzhou University decided to publish an underground publication, <i>Spark</i>, to alert Chinese people to the growing disaster and expose the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. Only two issues of this underground publication were printed before it was broken up as a counter-revolutionary group case and 43 people were arrested.
The author of this book, Tan Chanxue, was a key participant and helped save the memory of <i>Spark</i> from being lost. Tan was the girlfriend of Zhang Chunyuan, the magazine's founder, and participated in key moments of the magazine's short lifespan. She was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but was later released and rehabilitated, and taught at the Jiuquan Teachers' Training School. In 1982, she was transferred to the Dunhuang Research Institute as an associate researcher, and retired in 1998, settling in Shanghai.
It is largely through Tan's efforts that we know about <i>Spark</i>. She was able to look into her personnel file (<i>dang'an</i>), where she discovered the issues of the magazine, as well as confessions of the people arrested, and even her love letters to Zhang. She photographed this material and later it was turned into PDFs, which circulated around China starting in the late 1990s, helping to inspire books and movies.
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.
Film and Video
The Central Plains
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.
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.
Book
The Goddess of Freedom of the Chinese Nation -- An Anthology of Essays in Honor of Lin Zhao 40 Years After Her Death
Lin Zhao, formerly known as Peng Lingzhao, a native of Suzhou, was admitted to the journalism department of Peking University in 1954, but was classified as a Rightist in 1957. She was arrested and imprisoned in October 1960 because of her involvement with the underground magazine <i>Spark</i>. In 1965, Lin Zhao was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for "counter-revolutionary crimes." On April 29, 1968, she was sentenced to death and executed on the same day at the age of 36. This book is a collection of more than sixty articles written in memory of Lin Zhao.
Film and Video
The Gulag Book
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.
Book
The Legendary Marriage of A Legendary Writer
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.
Book
Thirty Years of New China
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.
Film and Video
Though I Am Gone
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>.
Film and Video
Three Days in Wukan
Wukan is a village in Luwei City, under the jurisdiction of Shanwei City, Guangdong Province. From 2011 to 2016, Wukan villagers have continued to fight to protect their land and fight for villagers' rights. Facing strong pressure from the government, some even paid with their lives. In the process, the villagers had elected their own villagers' committee by one person, one vote to practice their democratic rights. Although the protests were eventually suppressed, the impact was far-reaching. Ai Xiaoming rushed to the scene at the beginning of the Wukan incident and left this precious record.
Article
When did Chairman Mao decide to lure the snakes out of their holes?
This is an important article in Li Shenzhi's *Collected Writings*, which analyzes in detail why Mao Zedong wanted to "oppose the right," and how he launched the "anti-right" campaign.
Book
Who is the New China
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.