Sima Lu (1919-2021) was an expert in CCP history. He joined the CCP at the age of 18, and worked in Yan'an and Chongqing, where he came into contact with a number of high-ranking figures in the Communist Party. In Yan’an, he was the library director of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University and the director of Xinhua Daily’s Yan’an office. He was assigned by Chen Yun to engage in underground activities in Kuomintang-occupied areas, and was a CCP representative of the Korean Volunteer Corps. After witnessing the cruelty of the Party's internal struggle and the repeated blows he suffered within the Party, he left the party in 1943 and participated in pro-democracy activities, joining the China Democratic League, founding the magazine Free East, and organizing the Chinese People's Party; he left for Hong Kong in 1949 due to the persecution of the CCP, and founded the Chinese Free Writers Association, the Zilian News Agency, the Outlook magazine, and the Center for China Studies. He moved to the U.S. in 1983, where he founded the magazine Exploration and the Chinese Scholars Association.
He devoted himself to collecting and researching the history of the CCP, and wrote more than twenty books, including Eighteen Years of Struggle, History of the CCP and Selected Literature, Qu Qiubai's Biography, Theory of China's Peaceful Evolution, Politics in Contemporary China, Dream of the Red Chamber and Political Characters, and Witnesses to the History of the CCP.
