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Book
A Non-governmental White Paper on the June Fourth Massacre
At the turn of the spring and summer of 1989, democratic protests broke out in Beijing and other cities in China. In the early hours of June 4, the Chinese government dispatched troops to suppress the movement. In 2009, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the June 4th Incident in 2009, some participants in the movement jointly released the "Unofficial White Paper on the June 4th Incident". The book has 48 pages and a large number of illustrations.
This white paper attempts to provide a complete political background and legal analysis of the events based on reports from Chinese newspapers, radio and television stations at the time, as well as memoirs and interviews that have been published over the past 20 years. Participants in this book believe that the Chinese government has not conducted a comprehensive investigation and objective evaluation of the June 4th Incident, and has long blocked relevant information and prohibited private investigation and discussion of the matter. The report is called a "white paper" to emphasize its rigor and normative nature.
Participants in this book include Hu Ping, Yan Jiaqi, Wang Juntao, Wang Dan, Yang Jianli and others. The book was written by Li Jinjin, a doctor of law.
Book
Anthology of Essays by Zhang Zuhua, An
Zhang Zuhua is an independent scholar in China. In his early years, he served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, Secretary of the Youth League Committee of the Central State Organs. Later, he worked at a private research institute, mainly engaged in political modernization, the theory and practice of constitutional democracy, and China's political reform. He was a key participant in China's Charter 08 in 2008. This book is a collection of his political essays.
Book
Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao's China
This book is the brainchild of Prof. Lian Xi of Duke University, U.S.A. In March 2018, it was published in English by Basic Books in the U.S.A. In 2021, it was published in Chinese by Taiwan Business Press. Based on a large amount of historical materials as well as first-hand interviews, this book reconstructs Lin Zhao's life. It depicts the political development before and after the birth of New China, and presents the resilient will and beliefs of intellectuals in this era.
To purchase this book, please visit [the publisher](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lian-xi/blood-letters/9781541644229/?lens=basic-books), or a bookseller.
Book
Bloodshed in Beijing and China: Hong Kong Wen Wei Bao 1989 Special Edition
During the pro-democracy movement in 1989, Hong Kong journalists gathered in Beijing, including Wen Wei Bao"" reporters. This book is a special issue of *Wen Wei Bao* for 1989. It contains a large number of photographs, all taken by its reporters. "After the June 4 massacre, the Communist Party of China (CCP) settled scores with the editorial team of Hong Kong's "Wen Wei Bao," replacing the president, editor-in-chief, and deputy editors-in-chief. The editor-in-chief at the time, Jin Yaoru, later moved to the United States and publicly announced his resignation from the party.
Book
Chronicle of the 1989 Counter-Revolutionary Rebellion in Beijing
Published in 1989 by the Beijing Daily News, this book is the Chinese government's official account and presentation of the June Fourth Incident. Officially, it describes the June 4 Incident as an upheaval and even stigmatizes it as a counter-revolutionary riot. Some of the accounts presented here need to be judged against other sources.
Official Documents
Declassified Files of the Canadian Government on the June Fourth Incident
This document, declassified in January 2015, contains a 1989 diplomatic memorandum from the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. It describes the circumstances surrounding the June 4 massacre as they were known to officials at the Canadian embassy.
The documents, declassified by the National Library and Archives of Canada, show the Canadian government's concern about the invasion of the embassy by Chinese troops. The documents also describe the crackdown in Beijing and how the troops killed citizens.
Book
Democracy Curriculum
Written by Chinese liberal intellectual Liu Junning, this book circulated underground in 2006. The book parses the fundamentals of democracy as well as historical experience. It was quickly banned in China.
Film and Video
Enemy of the State
On February 9, 2010, Tan Zuoren was tried in the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court for the crime of inciting subversion against the state. Ai Xiaoming and her team recorded the three days before and after the verdict, the mindsets of Tan Zuoren’s friends and relatives, and how the lawyers carried out their work.
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Book
Escape From China: The Long Journey from Tiananmen to Freedom
Author Zhang Boli, a former student leader of the June 4 Democracy Movement, was ranked 17th on the "21 Most Wanted List." After June 4, Zhang Boli went into hiding in his hometown in Northeast China and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where he was detained and repatriated by the Soviets. The Soviets did not hand him over to the Chinese border guards, but let him leave on his own. In the two years following June 4, Zhang Boli was the only June 4 pro-democracy leader who was neither captured by the Chinese Communist Party nor able to flee China. It was not until 1991 that Zhang Boli arrived in Hong Kong through secret channels and applied for political asylum at the U.S. Consulate. *Escape From China：The Long Journey from Tiananmen to Freedom* was published and translated into many languages. The English version won the Washington Post's "Best Book Award".
Book
Great Power Sinking: A Memo to China, A
This book is a collection of political essays by Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. It is a sister volume to *Single-Edged Poisoned Sword - A Critique of Contemporary Nationalism in China*, which covers many aspects of Chinese politics, including: one-party dictatorship, powerful capitalism, rights defense, June Fourth, and nationalism.
Book
History of the 1989 Democracy Movement
This 10-volume book of 1.3 million words was written by Chen Xiaoya, a former associate researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The first edition was written in April 1994 and published in Taiwan in 1996, but with just over 200,000 words. Later, Chen Xiaoya revised the book several times to increase its content: starting from 1976, the year of Mao Zedong's death, and covering Hu Yaobang's political career as well as the background of the June Fourth Incident and also adding the contents of the memoirs of the parties involved in the June Fourth Incident. The number of words was increased to 1,360,000 words in 2016 when the book was published. The book was reprinted in 2019.
Purchase link：https://www.amazon.com/%E3%80%8A%E5%85%AB%E4%B9%9D%E6%B0%91%E9%81%8B%E5%8F%B2%E3%80%8B%E3%80%8A%E5%85%AB%E4%B9%9D%E6%B0%91%E8%BF%90%E5%8F%B2%E3%80%8B-%E7%AC%AC%E5%85%AB%E5%8D%B7-DEMOCRACY-MOVEMENT-Traditional-ebook/dp/B07VN848V8
Book
Holy Virgin on the Altar - A Biography of Lin Zhao
This book is a biography of Lin Zhao written by mainland writer Zhao Rui and published by Taiwan's Xiuwei Information Publishing House in 2008. The book describes Lin Zhao's life and family background in detail. The "Appendix" contains the recollections of several people involved.Purchase link: https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010431680.
电影及视频
In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul
Hu Jie narrates the life of Lin Zhao, a Christian dissident who was condemned as a Rightist in the late 1950s and executed during the Cultural Revolution. Prior to becoming a mentcritic of the government, Lin Zhao was an ardent believer of communism. She demonstrated talent in writing and speaking as a star student in Peking University. However, after criticizing the government in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, she was cast as anti-revolutionary. Despite the government’s attempts to silence her, Lin Zhao continued to speak and write publicly, including contributing two epic poems to Spark, an underground student-run journal. In 1960, she was arrested, and despite being released briefly in 1962, spent the rest of her life behind bars, under extremely poor living conditions. Nevertheless, she continued to write in prison, sometimes with her blood. In 1968, at the age of 36, she was executed by a firing squad.
In this documentary, Hu Jie showcases many of Lin Zhao’s surviving writings and poetry. These pieces often contain criticisms of the communist regime, as well as commentary on policy issues pertaining to labor and land reform. In making this film, Hu Jie traveled around China to interview friends and associates of Lin Zhao, who knew her as a student, activist, or prisoner. This documentary includes excerpts from interviews with them, which inform us about Lin Zhao’s personality and motivations.
This documentary has contributed to a widespread revival of interest in Lin Zhao, who had almost become a forgotten figure until the film’s appearance.
Book
Inside the bloody clearing of Tiananmen Square
This book is a complete record of the entire process of the forceful clearing of Tiananmen Square in 1989, which began at noon on June 3, 1989, and ended at 10:00 a.m. on June 4th. The author, Wu Renhua, who experienced the June Fourth Incident, describes some of the important events and characters in the book. For example, how Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian and other "Four Gentlemen" contacted and negotiated with the PLA martial law forces; how the tanks of the six departments chased and crushed the evacuating students; and how the medical staff put their own lives at risk to save the wounded in the rain of bullets and bullets. The first draft of this book was completed in May 1990, according to Wu Renhua's own account. He fled the mainland in 1992. In May 2007, he published *Inside the Bloody Clearance of Tiananmen Square* in Los Angeles. This was his first monograph on June Fourth. The book has since been updated and reprinted several times.
Book
June 4 Diary: The Republic in the Square
This diary took eighteen years to finalize. Based on a first draft from 1990-1991, it is a complete account of the author's experiences at that time: from his initial participation in the formation of the Preparatory Committee of Beijing University (Beida) to his election as the President of Beida’s Union and as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Forum. It continues up to the time of the evacuation vote by presidency of Forum in the early morning of June 4 and includes other tragic and poignant scenes of history.
Purchase link：https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010436793
Book
June Fourth Poems
"June Fourth Poetry Collection" is a collection of poems about the June Fourth Incident in 1989. The poems were collected and compiled by international experts and scholars in collaboration with activists who participated in the movement and those who lived in exile during the year following the crackdown. The books was published by Boulder Publishing House. Jiang Pinchao, a student leader of the pro-democracy movement in those years, is the chief editor of the collection. It is divided into five parts. The book was not published in mainland China due to seizure by the Chinese government. In May 2007, it was distributed by the June Fourth Cultural Communication Association and Amnesty International at the California Institute of Technology in the United States.
Book
Lin Zhao Anthology
The Lin Zhao Anthology contains nearly one hundred of Lin Zhao's works, including essays, poems, commentaries, and news reports written since her middle school years, as well as all of Lin Zhao's manuscripts and letters that were written in prison and later returned to her family. The collection was edited and compiled by Lin Zhao's friends Tan Chanxue (see separate entry) and Ni Jingxiong, and printed into a book on their own. Most of Lin Zhao’s manuscripts written in her blood in prison were typed on computer by Tan Chanxue. This anthology is the most important historical material used by Prof. Lian Xi of Duke University for his research and writing of the book "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China."
Article
Lin Zhao: A Letter to the Editorial Board of People's Daily
This is one of the most significant essays written by Lin Zhao, the pen name of the Christian intellectual Peng Lingzhao, who was born on January 23, 1932 in Suzhou.
In 1947, she attended a Methodist girls school and was baptized. Soon after, however, she joined the underground Communist Party and began writing critiques of the Kuomintang-led government under the pen name Lin Zhao. Before the Communist takeover in 1949, Lin Zhao ran away from home to attend a journalism school run by the party. During this time she joined party campaigns to eradicate the landholding gentry that ran local society.
Lin Zhao was admitted to the Chinese Department of Peking University in 1954. It was there that she broke with Communism and gradually rediscovered her Christian faith. She was classified as a rightist in 1957 for speaking up for other students. During this time, she met Zhang Chunyuan, one of the founders of the magazine "Spark," which the China Unofficial Archives also holds. She contributed two epic poems to the magazine. The magazine was shut down in 1960 and people affiliated with it were detained, including Lin.
She was released on medical parole in early 1962 due to tuberculosis, but was arrested and imprisoned again in December of the same year. She was detained in Shanghai No. 1 Detention Center and Tilanqiao Prison. When she was denied a pen and paper, she sometimes used a sharpened straw or chopstick to prick her finger and write in blood.
While in prison, she wrote a large number of texts, including the 140,000-word essay to <i>People’s Daily</i> that we feature here. This essay is the fullest expression of Lin’s political beliefs. She wrote it in 1965, dating it July 14 because it was the date of the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution. It took Lin five months to finish the letter, which ran to 137 pages. She wrote the essay in ink, but stamped it repeatedly with a seal bearing the character “zhao” that she inked in her own blood.
The letter has not (yet) been translated into English so a few salient points are worth mentioning.
As Lin’s biographer, the Duke University professor Lian Xi wrote in his biography of Lin (<i>Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China</i>, Basic Books, 2018):
“Lin Zhao challenged the theory of a continuous ‘class struggle,’ which the Communists saw as intrinsic to human history and from which there was no escape. Since the 1920s, the CCP had looked upon this theory as an immutable truth and had used it to justify the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat after 1949….”
Lin Zhao scoffed at this. ‘I do not ever believe that, in such a vast living space that God has prepared for us, there is any need for humanity to engage in a life-and-death struggle!’ The CCP dictatorship was but a modern form of ‘tyranny and slavery,’ she wrote in her letter to the party’s propagandists.
“'As long as there are people who are still enslaved, not only are the enslaved not free, those who enslave others are likewise not free!,' she wrote. Those seeking to end Communist rule in China must likewise not ‘debase the goal of our struggle into a desire to become a different kind of slave owner.' ‘The lofty overall goal of our battle dictates that we cannot simply set our eyes on political power—the goal must not and cannot be a simple transfer of political power!’"
“The end was ‘political democratization… to make sure that there will never be another emperor in China!"
Professor Lian continues: “Lin Zhao wrestled with the moral question of whether violence was a justified means to that end. Her Christian faith had hardened her for the fight. At the same time, it also tempered her opposition. She acknowledged the occasional ‘sparks of humanity’ even in those who were at the ‘most savage center’ of Chinese communism. As strenuously as she argued against her imprisonment, against Mao’s dictatorship, and for a free society, she was unable to sanction violence in that struggle. ‘As a Christian, one devoted to freedom and fighting under the Cross, I believe that killing Communists is not the best way to oppose or eliminate communism.’ She admitted that, had she not ‘embraced a bit of Christ’s spirit,’ she would have had every reason to pledge ‘bloody revenge against the Chinese Communist Party.’”
The same year that the letter was finished, Lin Zhao was sentenced to 20 years for counterrevolutionary crimes. On April 29, 1968, the sentence was changed to death and she was executed on the same day. She was 36 years old.
Book
Lin Zhao: No Longer Forgotten
This book contains a number of articles in memory of Lin Zhao. It concerns the death of Lin Zhao as well as Lin Zhao's love, pursuits, and disillusionment. This book was published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House in 2000.