This is the fourth issue of the “Our Stories” series published by WeChat public account “We and Equality,”, a compilation of 20 oral narratives from Chinese people who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic firsthand, and a personal reflection by the author of this issue, Qiao Yilin. The editors hope to “document the history of ordinary people, to combat the forgetting that should never have happened, and to present the real experiences, feelings, and voices of all of us–to help us remember what has happened to us.”
The interviewees in this volume are diverse, including those of different ages, educational background, ethnicities, physical and mental status, sexual orientations,marital status, and mobility. They shared their own memories of the pandemic, including facing threats to their survival due to food shortage, not being able to take anti-depression medication due to the lockdown, international students having a hard time returning to China, people with hearing impairments facing various inconveniences, and the discrimination faced by those who had recovered from COVID-19Although primarily focusing on experiences and feelings during the pandemic, many interviewees shared additional personal stories that provided useful background information for readers to understand their situation during the pandemic.
In addition to these personal narratives, “We and Equality” also published a 44-question “Women's Mental Health Questionnaire” on WeChat, asking about respondents’ experience during the pandemic, including their sense of belonging, care/housework commitments, sleep quality, emotional and mental status, feeling about quarantine, lockdown, illness or death of loved ones, and attitudes towards the government’s COVID-19 policies. The questionnaire received a total of 453 valid responses. Based on the responses, “We and Equality” has compiled a bilingual data analysis report.
”We and Equality" is a grass root project started in November 2016. Through the WeChat public account, they publish articles weekly to raise awareness and share knowledge on gender-related issues in China. They also organize in-person activities bi-weekly where people gather for in-depth discussion, and foster a community to promote gender equality.
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.
This is a collection of essays by Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. The title, inspired by Hannah Arendt, covers a wide range of fields from poetry and movies to politics and ethics, and tells the stories of fascinating people, the construction of their inner world and external lives. These people include Hai Zi, Wang Xiaobo, Arendt, Woolf, Beauvoir, Tarkovsky, Kremer, Herbert, Havel, and many others. Behind these seemingly unrelated names, there are hints of these two interdependent spiritual dimensions: on the one hand, the construction of the external world in which we live; on the other hand, the construction of our own inner world, which cannot be neglected. This book, published by Renmin University of China Press in 2003, has had a significant impact on the development of civil society in China.
Shanghai is where the Cultural Revolution was launched, and the Shanghai Cultural Revolution is an important part of China's decade-long Cultural Revolution. This book is an important work about the decade-long Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. It has been commented that "Li Xun's book is the most detailed account of the Shanghai Cultural Revolution to date. Although other perspectives are possible, as far as political history is concerned, the basic framework is complete; and as far as the study and evaluation of the Cultural Revolution is concerned, the core of understanding the movement is almost lost without the Shanghai Cultural Revolution." This book was published by Oxford Press in 2015.
Here is a link to purchase the book from the publisher:
https://www.oupchina.com.hk/zh/general-interest/humanities/archives/2014/24_shanghai-cult-revolution
This book is Gao Hua's next masterpiece after *How the Red Sun Rose*. It entails a selection of papers published by the author between 1988 and 2004, covering the fields of Republican history, Communist Party history, and contemporary Chinese history. It captures the historical interaction between the present and the past. Gao reflects deeply on the far-reaching Chinese Communist Revolution. With a rigorous and empirical research methodology, he sketches a complex and colorful picture of history, presenting the multiple facets of twentieth-century China's history.
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.
This film records the story of Liu Xianhong, a woman from rural Xingtai, Hebei, who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion in the hospital and decided to publicly disclose her identity and sue the hospital. After fighting in the courts, she finally received compensation. This documentary demonstrates the surging awareness of civil rights in rural China at the grassroot level through depicting the experiences of several families and the concerted efforts of patients to form “care” groups to collectively defend their civil rights. Due to public awareness, media intervention, and legal aid, the government also introduced new policies to improve the situations of patients and their families.
This film is in Chinese with both English and Chinese subtitles.
The book is a transcript of conversations between Yao Jianfu, a well-known Chinese scholar, and Chen Xitong, who was released on medical parole between 2010 and 2012. Chen Xitong was the mayor of Beijing during the 1989 student movement and was considered one of the main suppressors of the movement. In 1998, Chen was sentenced to 16 years in prison on charges of "embezzlement." In 2004, he was released on medical parole. In this book, Chen Xitong tells his version of the June 4 Tiananmen massacre. He denies not only that he was the head of the "June 4 Martial Law Command" and also claims he is innocent of the charge corruption.
Published in China in 1989, this book caused a sensation, reportedly selling as many as 300,000 copies. Described as the first "descriptive study" of the reality of China. In order to raise national awareness of the need for environmental protection, it examines the agricultural, environmental, and resource problems that China was likely to encounter in the course of modernization and predicts that the future would likely be even worse. The book was banned immediately after publication.
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.
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.
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".
Born in 1932, He Fengming and her husband Wang Jingchao were both labeled "rightists" during their work at the Gansu Daily Newspaper. In late April 1958, they were sent down to work at the Anxi Farm in Jiuquan. Her husband was sent to the famed Jibiangou Farm, where he died of starvation during the famine of 1960, but she survived. In order to refuse to forget, she spent ten years writing a 400,000-dollar self-narrative, *Experience - My 1957*. The book was published by Dunhuang Literary Publishing House in 2001.
During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, ideological control was extremely harsh. However, a small group of young people at great personal risk still carried out extremely serious study and thinking.
This book is a study of this group of young thinkers. Written by Yin Hongbiao (b. 1951), a professor of history at Peking University, it examines the lives and motivations of some of these contrarian thinkers. Instead of focusing on well known thinkers from the Cultural Revolution, such as Yu Luoke, Professor Yin seeks to rescue "missing persons" from history. These are not mainstream public intellectuals, but grassroots thinkers who challenge the mainstream. In this book, they include people such as Chen Erjin, a young man from the mountainous province of Guizhou, who in 1976 published an essay "On Privilege" that proposed protection of human rights and a western-style separation of powers.
The book also allows us to understand the thinking of young people from the middle of the last century. As the critic Hu Ping noted in a review of this book (https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/pinglun/huping/hp-11302009095820.html):
"The 19th-century Russian thinker Herzen wrote: 'Can future generations understand and evaluate all the horrors and all the tragic aspects of our existence? ... Oh, let future generations linger on before we sleep under the tombstone, let us meditate and pay our respects; we are worthy of their respect!' Reading "Footprints of the Missing" written by Dr. Yin Hongbiao of Peking University reminds me of Herzen's words."
This monograph by Sun Liping, a professor at Tsinghua University, was published by China Literature Publishing House in 2003. The author systematically analyzes a series of changes in Chinese social life since the 1990s. The book discusses the meaning and characteristics of fractured society; the formation and background of fractured society; widening income gaps and the formation of vulnerable groups; the new urban-rural dual structure; trust crisis and social order; social conflicts and institutional innovation, etc.
Zhang Zhan, born in 1983, is a Chinese lawyer and a dissident of the Communist Party system. In early February 2020, she rushed from Shanghai to Wuhan, which was under lockdown due to the COVID-19 epidemic, to conduct on-the-spot interviews and released a series of video reports on Wuhan's lockdown. More than three months later, she was arrested by Chinese police for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" and taken to Shanghai for detention.
In December 2020, she was sentenced to four years in prison for picking quarrels and provoking trouble. Zhang Zhan went on hunger strike in the detention center and prison, and there were reports that he was critically ill several times. Her courage and resistance attracted the attention of the international community.
The book *Free Zhang Zhan* was edited and created by Wang Jianhong, the head of the "Zhang Zhan Concern Group" on the Internet. It brings together Zhang Zhan's articles and self-media posts published on the Internet, as well as interviews of Zhang Zhan before she lost her freedom, and interviews, as well as poems and articles from outsiders supporting Zhang Zhan. The book reviews the course of Zhang Zhan's case, Zhang Zhan's struggle in prison and the repercussions it aroused at home and abroad. It was published on May 13, 2024 when Zhang Zhan was released from prison after serving her sentence.
This book preserves and records the history of Wuhan's lockdown in China due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Nowadays, Zhang Zhan's articles and words of support for her have been censored and blocked in China, which makes the book even more precious.
This book was originally published in the series *Micro Traces of the Past* - Documentary Volume - No. 6, edited by Huang Heqing, founded in 2007. Gan Cui, a student at Renmin University of China, was classified as a rightist in 1957. He became lovers with Lin Zhao, a rightist student who came from Peking University to work in the data room. Gan Cui was later sent to Xinjiang. When he returned, he learned that Lin Zhao had been killed. This book, 140,000 characters in total, is a manuscript of Gan Cui's memories of Lin Zhao in the context of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
The year 2003 was known as the birth of the Weiquan—the rights defense–movement, which was marked by the Sun Zhigang incident in Guangzhou. At the same time, a campaign began to get justice for Huang Jing, a teacher from Hunan who was sexually assaulted and killed by her boyfriend. The campaign involved the victim’s family, netizens, feminist scholars and activists, and lasted for several years. This documentary records the process of Huang Jing’s case from filing to post-judgement, and analyzes the broader issue of sexual violence against women in China.
The films in this series are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
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.