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Book
Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution
This book is the memoir of Chinese economist's Yang Xiaokai. It tells the stories of more than two dozen characters he met while imprisoned in Changsha during the Cultural Revolution. Published in 1994, it was reprinted in 1997 and 2016. The English version is titled *Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution*, published by Stanford University Press in 1997.
Book
In Search of Cannibal Witnesses
This book is part of author Eva's "Famine Trilogy." Because her mother was a survivor of the famine in Gansu, Eva has obsessively pursued and recorded that tragic history. She visited a dozen counties in Gansu and Shaanxi four times and interviewed two hundred and fifty people. The list of starving victims recorded in the book is about eight hundred and thirty, while as many as one hundred and twenty-one incidents of cannibalism and cannibalistic phenomena were recorded.
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.
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.
Article
My Life: China's Direction
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Yang Xiaokai was a senior high school student at No. 1 Middle School in Changsha. On January 12, 1968, he published an article entitled "Where is China Going?" which systematically put forward the ideas of the "ultra-leftist" Red Guards, criticized the privileged bureaucratic class in China, and advocated for the establishment of a Chinese People's Commune based on the principles of the Paris Commune. Yang Xiaokai recalled that his parents were beaten because they sympathized with Liu Shaoqi's and Peng Dehuai's views, and that he was discriminated against at school and could not join the Red Guards. As a result, he joined the rebel faction to oppose the theory of descent. Yang Xiaokai was later sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for this article. Yang Xiaokai died in 2004. This article is a retrospective of his life.
Book
My Mother ：Gao Yaojie
Author Eva writes about her relationship with Gao Yaojie, a Chinese doctor. Dr. Gao Yaojie, who was severely repressed by the Chinese government for exposing the mass infection of Chinese farmers in Henan Province, China, by selling their blood, had no choice but to leave China at the age of 78 and go into exile in the United States. The dissemination of her story is strictly forbidden in China. In this book, author Eva describes Gao Yaojie's noble heart, her story, and her experiences.
Film and Video
Not the Foreign Force
During the three years of the "zero-COVID" policy enforced by Xi Jinping's government, the daily life and freedoms of the people were severely limited. A fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, finally ignited public dissatisfaction with the measures. On November 26, 2022, when the people of Shanghai spontaneously gathered in the streets to mourn the victims of the fire, no one expected that this memorial activity would lead to nationwide protests against the pandemic policies. At the scene, Chen Pinlin and his girlfriend, Wang, filmed many protest videos at the protest site on Urumqi Middle Road in Shanghai.
In November 2023, on the anniversary of the White Paper Movement, Chen Pinlin uploaded the documentary to YouTube and other social media platforms, garnering hundreds of thousands of views. Less than a week later, he and his girlfriend were arrested. His girlfriend was released on bail, while Chen Pinlin remained in custody.
<a href=“https://tenchu.org/pocd/public/pocs/3551”>Chen Pinlin introduced the documentary as follows</a>: "I am the director Plato. In November 2022, I personally participated in the protest on the night of November 26 in Shanghai. This was my first involvement in a political event in China, and it was also the first time I expressed my political demands in China. Besides the footage I personally filmed on that day, the film also includes iconic video materials from before and after the protest. I tried to present a complete picture of how the dynamic zero-COVID policy pushed China to the boiling point and prompted people to take to the streets to protest. After the event, the Chinese government distorted the facts and maliciously smeared the protests in Shanghai and the White Paper movement, misleading many people into thinking that the protests were the work of foreign forces. But is this really the case? On the first anniversary of the Shanghai Urumqi Road protest, I created this documentary, “Urumqi Middle Road”, to record my personal experience and feelings of participating in the protest. I want to explore why, when internal contradictions appear in China, foreign forces are always blamed? Everyone knows the answer. The more the government misleads, forgets, and shields the truth, the more we must speak out, remind people, and remember. Remember the White Paper, remember November 26, remember Urumqi Middle Road, remember the Xinjiang fire, remember the Guizhou bus, remember dynamic zero-COVID, remember the 'big white' (the white-suited workers), remember Tiananmen, remember the Cultural Revolution, remember the Three Years of Great Famine. "By remembering the ugliness, we can turn our hearts toward the light. I also hope that China can soon embrace its own brighter future."
At the end of this movie, Chen left this narration: Some people say, what is the point of protesting on the streets? In the end, it's still the same, suppressed, shielded and misinterpreted. But as Churchill said, ‘Courage is the most important human trait, with courage, other human traits can naturally be possessed' We lacked experience and have been cowardly and wavering, but today we have the courage to stand up and to speak out. What we lacked this time, we can do better next time. If I were to do it again, I would still choose to be there. Because a government that is afraid of even a white paper can't defeat the justice in the hearts of the people.
On January 5, 2024, Chen Pinlin was formally arrested on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" and detained at Baoshan District Detention Center in Shanghai. On January 6, 2025, Chen Pinlin’s first trial was held in the Third Court of Baoshan District Court, where he was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in prison. His sentence will end on May 27, 2027.