On May 12, 2008, when the Great Sichuan Earthquake struck, writer Liao Yiwu began to write "Chronicle of the Great Earthquake", which was serialized in <i>Democratic China</i> and reprinted on several Chinese websites. It had a wide impact. Liao went to Dujiangyan, Juyuan Township, Yingxiu and other earthquake-hit areas to conduct on-the-spot interviews. His travels and writings during the earthquake were reported and translated by many mainstream media.
In April 2009, Taiwan's Asian Culture Publishing published and distributed the traditional Chinese edition of <i>Earthquake Insane Asylum</i>, a pictorial and textual factual record that preserves the living conditions of the people during of the Sichuan earthquake.
The author of this book was a reporter for "Sing Tao Daily" and was stationed in Beijing at the end of April 1989 to cover the democracy movement. The book is divided into six main parts: Square Facts records the course of the 1989 democracy movement, from the author's visit to Beijing in April to the early morning of June 4, when she and the masses were evacuated from Tiananmen Square. The second part concerns post-hijacking memories, which are some of the author's interviews from 1989. The third part concerns the interviews. The author had interviewed 7 student leaders and intellectuals that year. The leaders told her the reasons why they devoted themselves to the student movement. The fourth part is about the rest of the author's life, from June 4 to December 1990. The author has recorded some fragments of her speeches to the secondary school students in Hong Kong. Some of them are sentimental, some of them are confessional, and all of them are sincere and heartfelt. The fifth part is "Twenty Years of Wounds," which is a reminiscence written by the author on the 20th anniversary of June Fourth. The sixth part is about the grassroots of June 4. These grassroots actors have been pretty much forgotten. The author wanted to write a biography of the grassroots of June 4 in order to fill in gaps in history.
Land reform is one of the important events that affected the course of Chinese history in the twentieth century. Liao Yiwu spent two years on and off from the end of 2005 to complete <i>The Last Landlord</i>. The book comprises interviews with land reform survivors. As the author says, "Based on the degree of physical and mental weakening of the interviewees, I estimate that in another five or six years, the history of the land reform as orally told by those who witnessed it will be completely untraceable."
On New Year's Day 2018, Beihang University graduate Luo Xixi took the lead in breaking China's silence on the issue of sexual harassment when she publicly reported on social media that Beihang professor Chen Xiaowu had sexually harassed her. This was the first major event in China’s #Metoo movement, which has since spread from colleges and universities to other fields. #Metoo provoked an unprecedented discussion in China, and the issues of feminism and sexual harassment attracted a rare and widespread attention, with a variety of complaints, comments, studies, and advocacy articles springing up all over the internet.
<i>#MeToo in China Archives 2018.1-2019.7</i> is a compilation of sexual harassment-related articles written between January 2018 and July 2019. This archive is massive, totaling more than 2,500 pages, and is divided into three main volumes: “#Metoo in Higher Education”, “#Metoo in other fields”, and “#Metoo discussions’. Volume I and Volume II consist of individual #Metoo cases, arranged in chronological order. Articles in volume 3 can be broadly categorized into general reviews, investigative reports, personal stories, advocacy and activism, tools and resources,etc. During the #Metoo movement, many liberal public intellectuals questioned the movement, likening it to big-character posters during the Hundred Flowers campaign, and arguing that it might lead to the proliferation of wrongful convictions. It triggered heated debates, and this archive also contains a number of related articles.
The process of compiling this archive itself became an act of resistance, given the severe repression on freedom of expression and social movements. The editorial team faced tremendous challenges in collecting articles that had been deleted or published as images to bypass online censorship. It spent a great deal of time and personnel piecing together scraps of information and transcribing words in images. Reading traumatic personal stories - including those about the hardships in seeking remedies - caused psychological trauma for the editors themselves.
Nevertheless, #Metoo has also a process of collective healing, in which women with shared experiences saw each other, realized the structural problems behind sexual violence, and gained the strength to move on and push for change. Finally, during the compilation process, the editorial team also benefited from archiving efforts made by other websites and individuals, demonstrating that the rescue and preservation of people’s history is a collective and collaborative task.
This archive is published on https://chinesefeminism.org/.