Tan Chanxue (1934—2018)，a native of Kaiping, Guangdong Province, was labeled a Rightist in 1957 when she was a student at the Department of Chinese Literature of Lanzhou University. In August 1958, she and 41 other Rightist students and teachers of Lanzhou University were exiled to Tianshui County, Gansu Province, for laojiao, or re-education through labor. In 1960, during the peak of the Great Famine, students labeled Rightists at Lanzhou University, such as Zhang Chunyuan (see separate entry) and Gu Yan (see separate entry), decided to publish an underground publication, Spark, to expose the truth and comment on current affairs. Other students, including Tan Chanxue and the poet Lin Zhao (see separate entry), a student at Peking University, were also involved. The core members of Spark were later labeled as a counter-revolutionary group. Tan Chanxue was sentenced to 14 years in prison for her involvement in Spark, released in 1973 and sent to work in a factory. After her rehabilitation in 1980, Tan taught at the Jiuquan Normal University, then at the Dunhuang Academy, from which she retired in 1998. She moved to Shanghai and passed away there on June 1, 2018.
Starting in 2004, Tan Chanxue dedicated herself to documenting the history of Spark and the era that gave birth to it. Throughout the years, she traveled to Lanzhou and Tianshui to collect information and documents, and completed and published the book Spark: The Rightist Anti-Revolutionary Group Case at Lanzhou University. She and her friends also typed and edited Lin Zhao's writings in prison, some written with her own blood, into the Lin Zhao Anthology, which has become an important historical record.
Starting in 2004, Tan Chanxue dedicated herself to documenting the history of Spark and the era that gave birth to it. Throughout the years, she traveled to Lanzhou and Tianshui to collect information and documents, and completed and published the book Spark: The Rightist Anti-Revolutionary Group Case at Lanzhou University. She and her friends also typed and edited Lin Zhao's writings in prison, some written with her own blood, into the Lin Zhao Anthology, which has become an important historical record.
