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Book
In Search of Famine Survivors
This is the first book in author Eva's "Famine Trilogy," in which she traveled to Qin'an County, Tongwei County, and Tianshui District in Gansu Province as well as to Yaozhou and Tuxian County in Shaanxi Province in 2011. She interviewed more than two hundred survivors of the Great Famine, with the oldest person being ninety-five years old and the youngest being fifty-eight years old. This book allows these lowest class, mostly uneducated peasants to speak and provide their own witness, leaving behind their voices and oral history. Based on interviews with more than fifty interviewees, the book contains the names of more than five hundred victims and forty-nine incidents of cannibalism.
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
In Search of My Homeland
“In Search of My Homeland” is a collection of essays in three volumes written by Gao Ertai during his exile abroad. In this book, Gao looks back on his life. From his hometown of Gaochun, a small town in Jiangsu Province, to Suzhou, then to Lanzhou, Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Beijing, Chengdu, and the United States, Gao has undergone tremendous suffering, lost his home and family, and finally had to go into exile in a foreign country. Even though the work is widely regarded as having great literary merit, Gao uses real names and places, which makes the work a valuable historical document, especially for describing the Great Famine, and the brutal suppression of intellectual life during the Cultural Revolution at the Dunhuang research academy, which is one of China's most prestigious cultural institutions.
In an [interview](https://web.archive.org/web/20240130211408/https://www.aisixiang.com/data/80804.html), Gao explained why he wrote the book: "Searching for my homeland is nothing but searching for meaning.... Life is short and small, and its meaning can only be rooted in the external world and in the long history. My sense of drift and meaninglessness, that is, a feeling that the world has no order, history has no logic, and the individual has no home, seems to be a kind of destiny. My writing is nothing but a resistance to this destiny."
In 2004, a censored version of the first two volumes of this book was published by Huacheng Publishing House in Guangzhou; in 2011, an updated version was published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House, but still censored. The version uploaded to our archive is the traditional Chinese version of the complete three volumes published by Taiwan INK Publishing House in 2009.
Book
In Search of the Fleeing Women and Children
This book is part of writer Eva's "Famine Trilogy." It is also the only oral history monograph on women and children who fled the famine in Gansu and Shaanxi from 1958 to 1963 as of now. More than 1.3 million people starved to death in Gansu Province, the hardest-hit area of the Great Famine, and more than 100,000 women between the ages of 16 - 15 years old fled the famine and left Gansu. What happened to them and their children is one of the most tragic memories of the Great Famine.
Book
In the Palm of Buddha (Updated Edition)
Zhang Dongsun is an unavoidable but deliberately obscured figure in modern China. Considered the earliest translator of Western philosophy, a famous newspaperman, political commentator, and professor at Yenching University; the first mediator between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in 1949, and the first Central People's Government Member. He was convicted of treason in 1951 and disappeared. The well-known writer and journalist Dai Qing completed this historical documentary after eight years of investigation and writing and nearly ten years of revising and updating. Taking Zhang Dongsun's life as the main theme, he wrote about changing times from the late Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution.
An expanded edition of this book will be published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in 2022. The following is the link to purchase books from the publisher:
https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3466
Film and Video
Jiabiangou Elegy: Life and Death of the Rightists
This film is a five-part documentary by the filmmaker and feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming on the persecution of inmates at the Jiabiangou labor camp in Jiuquan, Gansu province, where more than 2,000 people died. The documentary includes interviews with the few remaining survivors and documents efforts to commemorate the dead. The director interviewed survivors of Jiabiangou and the children of the victims and listened to their stories about the past; she also found former correctional officers and their descendants to understand the causes of labor camps and the Great Famine from different angles.
Shot by Ai and a team of volunteers, the film presents the conflict between the preservation and destruction of memory.
Book
Jin Qiao Lu Man
During the three years of famine from 1959 to 1961, Tongwei's unnatural deaths due to starvation and its related factors amounted to one-third of the county's population. Mr. Zhang Dafa, who worked in Tongwei for many years and later took part in the preparation of the new Tongwei County Record. Published in 2005 through the Dingxi Writers' Association, this is a collection of his many social research reports on the Tongwei issue, "Jinqiao Luwan," which profoundly reveals the tragedy and gravity of the Great Famine, a man-made disaster, within the boundaries of a single county.
Book
Journey of Grace, The
Li Jinghang, a native of Tianshui City, Gansu Province, 1922-2016, graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Northwest Normal College in 1949. In the fall of the same year, he was employed as a mathematics teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1957, he was wrongly classified as a Rightist and sent to Jiuquan, Gansu Province to be reeducated through labor for nearly three years; in 1960, he resumed his work as a teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1962, he removed his hat as a Rightist. He was rehabilitated in 1978. In 1980, he was transferred to Tianshui Teachers' College (which was upgraded to an undergraduate institution in 2000). After retiring in the fall of 1987, he joined the Church to serve full-time.
In 1957, Li Jinghang was labeled a rightist and sent to Jiabiangou for re-education through labor. In 1960, he was transferred to the Mingshuihe Farm in Gaotai, where the conditions were even worse, and he was subjected to a great deal of torture and abuse. The fourth chapter of his autobiography, "Chronicle of the bitter life in Jiabiangou," and the fifth chapter, "Chronicle of the life after returning home," are written about his bitter experience in Jiabiangou. From this, we can see the glory of humanity and the power of faith in the midst of suffering. This book was published by a Hong Kong Tianma Book Company Limited in 2003, with a print run of 2,000 copies, and reprinted once in 2004.
Book
Killing and Hijacking: Tibet's Cultural Revolution Through the Lens
In 1966, when the flames of the Cultural Revolution began to spread, writer Tsering Woeser (唯色) was born in the General Hospital of the Tibetan Military Region. Her father was an officer in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Tibet at the time, and an avid photographer. Through his camera lens, the officer recorded the most comprehensive collection of images of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet to date. Tsering Woeser, on the other hand, restores and records the story behind the camera lens: It was an attempt to fight against oppression and preserve the true history of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution.
Book
Li Yizhe Incident - A Bottom-Up Appeal for Democracy and the Rule of Law in the Cultural Revolution
Li Yizhe is the signature of a famous large-print newspaper, “About Socialist Democracy and the Rule of Law,” during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. The newspaper was co-authored by three people: Li Zhengtian, a student at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts; Chen Yiyang, a high school student; and Wang Xizhe, a factory worker. The name Li Yizhe was created with characters taken from each of the three names.
"Li Yizhe" wrote three drafts from September 13, 1973 to November 7, 1974. On November 10, 1974, the newspaper was publicly posted on the streets of Guangzhou, with a total of sixty-seven sheets of white paper and more than 26,000 words. The content called for socialist democracy and the rule of law, in the form of a critique of the "Lin Biao system." It pointed directly at the shortcomings of the CCP's ultra-leftist movement that had trampled on democracy and the rule of law since the founding of the CCP. The newspaper pointed out that the social and historical conditions under which Lin Biao's group emerged reflected the ideology of China's feudal society, which had lasted for more than 2,000 years, and that the essence of Lin Biao's counter-revolutionary group reflected the ideology of the extreme left. Without naming names, the broadsheet also pointed out the many crimes of those in power and, in connection with these phenomena, analyzed the serious problems of the socialist "system" itself. Li Yizhe and others were arrested in 1977 and rehabilitated a year later.
Book
Life and Death In Shanghai
"Life and Death In Shanghai" (also known as "Shen Jiang Meng Hui") is an autobiography by female writer Zheng Nian. First published in English in 1986, it was subsequently translated into various languages and published in various countries. In the book, Zheng Nian recounts her personal experiences from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to her departure from China in the early 1980s. After her release from prison in 1973, she learned that, shortly after her imprisonment, her only daughter, Zheng Meiping, had been persecuted and had died. She then tried to find out the cause of her daughter's death. The book traces how the ideals of intellectuals were crushed by politics.
Book
Life of Storms: The New Life of a Disabled Prisoner, A
On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a Rightist in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles," authoritarianism, and tyranny. Liu was arrested on November 26 of that year. Four months later, he was executed for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this autobiography, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail not only Liu Wenhui's ideology but also how he was killed by the tyrannical government.
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.
Book
Liushahe Essay
Liushahe is a famous Chinese writer and scholar, who entered Sichuan University in the fall of 1949, and was criticized and stigmatized nationwide during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement for his work *Grass and Trees* named by Mao Zedong himself, and then subjected to a variety of labor reforms (building roads during the day and sawing wood in the evening) for a cumulative total of 20 years. In 1979, he was transferred back to the Sichuan Provincial Literature Federation. Since 1985 he has been writing full-time, and has published a number of books, including *Essays on the Liusha River*. This book was published by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House in 1995. Many of the essays are related to his experiences when he was under labor reform. In November 2019, Liushahe passed away in Chengdu at the age of 88 due to illness.
Book
Long Memories after the Hijacking -- Chronicle of Ten Years of Turmoil
The author of this book, Mu Xin, was an early member of the CPC and served as chief editor of "Guangming Daily" in the 1950s. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was a member of the Central Committee's Cultural Revolutionary Group. In 1967, he was defeated and imprisoned in the Imperial Prison (Qincheng Prison). This book was published in Hong Kong in 1997. Because of the author's status, this book is helpful for understanding high-level circumstances during the pre-Cultural Revolution and early Cultural Revolution period.
Book
Lushan meeting factual record
This book is a historical record of the 1959 Lushan Conference written by Li Rui. Based on the author's personal experience and the literature of the relevant departments of the Communist Party of China, the author has recorded the important points and events before and after the meeting. The first edition of this book was published in April 1989 by the Spring and Autumn Publishing House and Hunan Education Publishing House in mainland China; the updated edition was published in June 1994 by Henan People's Publishing House.
Book
Man-Made Disasters: The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine.
The author of this book, Ding Shu, is a Chinese scholar living in the United States. Published in 1991 by the Hong Kong-based "Nineties Magazine", this book is the first monograph on the Great Famine in China. It has been described by some scholars as the cornerstone of the study of the Great Famine in China. The book was later updated and reprinted. The book starts from the cooperative movement and moves on to the Great Leap Forward, the Great Iron and Steel Refining, the People's Commune, the Satellite Release and the Great Communist Wind; then, it turns to the Lushan Conference against right-leaning as well as the 7,000 People's Congress in 1962. The author collected almost all the information that could be collected at that time and summarized it to describe the situation of this great famine and its causes and consequences. The content of this book is from the website of the Chinese blog "Bianchengsuixiang" (编程随想).
Book
Mao in Power (1949-1976)
The author of this book, Shan Shaojie, is a scholar from mainland China. For several years, he wrote this book from an independent position. Former political secretary of Mao Zedong, Li Rui, and Princeton University professor, Yu Yingshi, wrote the foreword for this book. In addition to a systematic account of the Maoist era, Shan Shaojie's book "Mao in Power" emphasizes that almost all members of the Communist Party's highest decision-making echelons, with the exception of Mao Zedong, made efforts, in varying degrees and successively, to stop Mao's insanity. Moreover, they took turns to resist and ultimately to leave Mao alone, but did not really stop Mao's madness. This book was published by Linking Publishing in 2001 and has been reprinted several times.