Gan Cui (1932-2014) joined the People's Liberation Army in 1949 and the Chinese Communist Party in 1954. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Gan worked as a reporter for the newspaper *Wan County News* in Wan County, Sichuan Province, and was admitted to the Department of Journalism of the Renmin University of China in 1955. In 1958, Gan was labeled a Rightist and expelled from the Party. While he was subjected to supervised labor on campus, he met and became romantically involved with the poet Lin Zhao. Upon his graduation in 1959, Gan requested to stay close to Lin Zhao, but instead he was exiled to a labor camp in Xinjiang for 20 years. (Lin was later arrested and executed in 1968; see separate entry.) In 1979, Gan was rehabilitated, resumed his Party membership, and returned to Beijing. He then worked at the CCP Propaganda Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and later at the Institute of Literature of the CASS, before retiring in 1992. He died due to illness on October 23, 2014.
During the 1989 democracy movement, Gan went to the Tiananmen square daily to observe, record and collect materials. In the same year, he wrote a book entitled *The Soul of Peking University: From Lin Zhao to the 1989 Democracy Movement*, which was published in Taiwan in 2010, linking his memories of Lin to the June Fourth uprising. To inform the public about Lin Zhao, Gan also transcribed Lin’s most famous letter in prison – the 140,000-character “*A Letter to the Editorial Board of People's Daily*”, participated in the making of a statute of Lin, and provided full support to research on Lin, including helping independent filmmaker Hu Jie to produce a documentary about Lin and supporting Zhao Rui in writing *The Saint on the Altar: Lin Zhao Biography*.
