Tan Hecheng (b.1948—), a native of Changsha, Hunan Province, writer and editor.
Tan's father was a Kuomintang general; his mother, whose parents participated in the 1911 revolution, was a delegate to the Republic of China’s national parliament and was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
Tan joined a group of Red Guards traveling around China during the Cultural Revolution and later studied carpentry. In 1978, when university exams resumed, Tan was admitted to the Changsha University of Science and Technology, where he developed an interest in writing.
After graduation, he was assigned to work in a factory. After winning a prize for his reportage literature (baogao wenxue) work, he was recruited by one of the editors of Furong, or Hibiscus, a Changsha literary magazine.
In 1984, CCP’s reformist leader Hu Yaobang sent more than 1,300 officials to Dao County to investigate the mass killings that occurred in 1967. Tan was sent along with the team for part of its stay. As a writer for a state publication, Tan gained a number of documents unearthed during the investigation and conducted interviews, based on which he wrote an article of 100,000 characters.
His editors, however, said it could not be published because the political climate was changing with the start of the "bourgeois liberalization" campaign, which eventually led to Hu's fall. Tan decided to continue his investigation and traveled to Dao County many times to do follow-up interviews.
In 2010, he published *Blood Myths: the 1967 Mass Killings in Dao County, Hunan Province during the Cultural Revolution* through Hong Kong-based Tianxingjian Publishing House. This nine-volume work consists of 83 chapters and more than 500,000 characters. The book was revised in 2016.
According to Tan's investigation, in the 66 days from August 13 to October 17, 1967, more than 9,000 villagers, including women and children, were killed or forced to commit suicide because they were wrongly accused of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities.
Further Resources:
China’s Hidden Massacres: An Interview With Tan Hecheng
