In 1930, a mutiny erupted in the Red Army in the town of Futian. In the ensuring purge, more than 700 officers were executed. After this, the campaign to root out Anti-Bolshevik (AB) groups spread to various parts of China, with 70,000 executed. Occurring just nine years after the founding of the CCP, it is one of the earliest and most significant purges in the party's early history.
The first person to pay attention to the Futian Incident was Professor Dai Xiangqing of the Jiangxi Provincial Party School. Starting in late 1979, he and other colleagues went to southern Jiangxi to collect materials, conduct interviews and investigate, and found that this was an unjust and wrong case, and began to publish articles on the matter.
In the early 1980s, Dai Xiangqing sent his article to a senior general in the PLA, Xiao Ke. After that, the research on the Futian Incident attracted the attention of senior central officials. The CCP's party history research agency sent people to Hunan and Jiangxi to investigate and collect materials. The Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China sent a review team for the Futian Incident and reported the vindication documents to the central government, but even today there is currently no official conclusion on the matter.
This book is an important study of the early history of the Communist Party of China, often mentioned by prominent independent historians, such as Yang Kuisong. As an officially recognized research project, this book does not make ideological breakthroughs, but its detailed historical materials, and its data index make it particularly valuable for understanding this historical event.
This book was published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1994.
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.
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/.