The Database for the History of Contemporary Chinese Political Movements, 1949–
D ATA B A S E O F T H E
Chinese Political Campaigns in the 1950s
From Land Reform to the State-Private Partnership (1949–1956)
CHIEF EDITOR
Song Yongyi
S P E C I A L F E AT U R E S
• The First and the Largest Subscription-Based Online and CD Database on this subject;
• More than 9,000 documents, including CCP directives, bulletins, internal reports, officials’
speeches, and major media commentaries with detailed citations;
• First-hand sources totaling 30 million words meticulously collated;
• Material of rare value, of which 40% is from internal archives at various levels, including 2,000
highly classified records and investigative reports filed during many movements such as Land
Reform, suppression of counterrevolutionaries and ideological remolding;
• Fully functional search-engine in both Chinese and English: data retrievable by author, subject,
title, date, keywords, and locality;
• New features such as print, keyword highlight, and toggle between Chinese and English;
• Allowing unlimited campus-wide access with remote log-in and download functions;
• Timely database update when new material becomes available.
E D ITO R I A L B OA R D
• Song Yongyi 宋永毅 (California State University, Los Angeles, USA)
• Guo Jian 郭 建 (University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, USA)
• Ding Shu 丁 抒 (Normandale Community College, USA)
• Zhou Yuan 周 原 (University of Chicago, Chicago, USA)
• Dong Guoqiang 董國強 (Nanjing University, China)
• Shen Zhijia 沈志佳 (University of Washington, USA)
• Zhou Zehao 周澤浩 (York College of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Xia Yong 謝泳 (Xiamen University, China)
More info: http://goo.gl/QlrBMX
Published by
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Distributed by
The Chinese University Press
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, N.T., Hong Kong
Tel.: +852 3943 9800 Fax: +852 2603 7355 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.chineseupress.com
CONTENTS
Preface by Yongyi Song
Foreword by Roderick MacFarquhar
Part I. Documents and Directives from the CCP Central Committee and All Levels of Government
Part II. Remarks, Instructions, and Writings by Mao Zedong
Part III. Remarks and Instructions from Party and State Leaders
Part IV. Editorials and Important Articles from Major Newspapers and Magazines
Part V. Other Important Articles and Reports
Part VI. Grievances, Resistance, Revolts, and Related Disturbances within the CCP and Among the
General Populace
Part VII. Internal Archives, Investigation Reports, Directives, Statistics, and Other Documents
Part VIII.Special Archival Files, Self-criticisms and Confessions, Case Conclusions, and Other
Documents
F O R E W O R D (abstract) | Roderick MacFarquhar (Harvard University)
I
n the early 1950s, there were very few Western political scientists, indeed few scholars in any discipline,
who were studying the new regime in mainland China. The economic historian Walter Rostow and a few
colleagues wrote The Prospects for Communist China in 1954, but there was just one scholar, hitherto a historian
of ancient China, who decided to examine in detail the activities of the Chinese Communist Party in power:
Richard L. (“Dixie”) Walker, whose China under Communism: The First Five Years was published in 1955.
Walker faced a number of difficulties. Unlike most scholars today, he had no access to China. Moreover, Beijing
allowed very few of its domestic publications to be exported. The CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FBIS) and the BBC Monitoring Service provided broadcast material in translation. The US Consulate General in
Hong Kong was translating Xinhua releases and People’s Daily articles for its Survey of China Mainland Press, but
it was not till the mid-1950s, that the consulate was able to publish Extracts (later Selections) from China Mainland
Magazines, signaling that smuggled material was now reaching Hong Kong in sufficient quantities for a new title
to be launched. Perhaps, Walker obtained materials from the KMT on Taiwan.
During the reform era, an avalanche of new material, both official and unofficial, has descended upon China
watchers: nianpu and collected speeches of major leaders, as well as biographies and reminiscences about them and
many other lesser figures in the party; autobiographies by senior leaders, some published in Hong Kong because
they were written without official permission; chronologies; documentary collections; statistical compendia;
innumerable books about significant incidents in the Maoist period; directories and handbooks from ministries
and other organizations; county gazeteers and local histories of various kinds; and in some parts of some provinces,
persistent scholars have managed to get access to archives.
As historians of modern China tiptoe into the Maoist period, how are they to gain control of this mass of
material? Fortunately for them, a distinguished group of seven Chinese-American historians and librarians,
aided by colleagues in Taiwan and on the Chinese mainland, have labored mightily over the past 16 years,
collecting enormous quantities of data on what they have delineated as the key characteristic of Maoist politics:
the campaign, what Walker called the drive, the movements designed to mobilize the Chinese people incessantly
in the quest for one target or another. Ultimately, whatever the official goal, the objective of every campaign was
political, a weeding out from the “broad masses” of loyal, activist, or simply obedient Chinese of the notional five
percent of citizens who were recalcitrant in some way, which might indicate, according often to the whim of the
officiating cadre, disloyalty or even counter-revolutionary tendencies.
These seven scholars of the Maoist trove started with the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” the mother of
all movements in its length, 10 years, and the massive disruption it caused in China. Their aim, as survivors of the
Cultural Revolution, was to supply western scholars with additional data for researching it. But as Song Yongyi
explains in his preface, conscience and a sense of duty compelled them to chronicle previous movements. The
Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database, 1957–followed in 2010; The Chinese Great Leap Forward Great Famine
Database, 1958–1962 followed in 2013; and their work concludes with this latest Database of Chinese Political
Campaigns from Land Reform to State-Private Joint Ownership, 1949–1956. In total, the four databases comprise
over 30,000 documents. For scholars and PhD students of modern China, these databases provide a magnificent
starting block which Richard Walker would have envied, and the field owes a considerable debt of gratitude to
Dr. Song and his colleague.
COMMENTS FROM SCHOLARS
T
his is a monumental achievement. Database of the Chinese Political Campaigns in the 1950s: From Land
Reform to the State-Private Partnership (1949–1956) is an invaluable resource for researchers. The documents
painstakingly collected by Dr. Song and his colleagues provide shocking revelations of the brutality that ravaged
Chinese society and destroyed millions of innocent lives in the early days of the People’s Republic. They also
offer unique insights into the political calculations of the Communist Party’s top leadership in launching these
campaigns.
Pei Xinmin 裴敏欣
Director of the Keck Center for International & Strategic Studies
Claremont McKenna College, USA
F
or scholars concerned with historical truth—in and beyond China—this database is an essential and masterful
starting point. There is simply no other collection that is as detailed, as scrupulous and as revealing as this
one. The imperatives of moral conscience and historical memory have been combined here to cast fresh light
upon the harshest era of Chinese history. Revelations of Maoist atrocities are no longer news. What is priceless for
historical researchers is the detailed chronology of disaster starting with Party policies of the early 1950s—which
have been shrouded in generalities before.
Vera Schwarcz 舒衡哲
Wesleyan University, USA
“W
ho controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This notorious
piece of “Newspeak” from George Orwell’s dystopia 1984 captures so well the belief of the
Chinese Communist Party which has tried all means to whitewash its Maoist past and stifle debate on China’s
contemporary history. All publications are censored, historical journals are under pressure to follow the party
line, and the voice of those who dare remember is invariably suppressed in the People’s Republic, for the ruling
party knows that collective memory and public knowledge of the past will result in a pluralistic vision of history
characteristic of a well-informed and enlightened citizenry in a democratic society. The exhaustive databases
compiled and edited by Song Yongyi and his colleagues, which contain an enormous amount of what the party
deems as “state secrets,” are the best antidote to the deplorable historical amnesia that the regime has enforced.
Whatever their viewpoints, public in general and historians in particular will benefit from these databases and be
able to ground their interpretations of history in accessible documents which depict the reality of Maoism under
all its aspects. Thanks to the editors’ courage and persistent and painstaking efforts of the past 16 years, the world
now has an indispensable tool for research and education in the history of contemporary China.
Jean-Philippe Béja 白夏
Senior Research Fellow at CNRS Paris, CEFC Hong Kong
— IN THE SERIES —
“The Database for the History of Contemporary
Chinese Political Movements,1949–”
1.The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database (1966–1976), published in 2002–2014, including
comprehensive sources on Chinese political movements between 1963–1985.
2.The Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database (1957–), published in 2010–2013, covering sources on
Chinese political movements between 1955–1958.
3.The Chinese Great Leap Forward–Great Famine Databases (1958–1962), published in 2013–2014, covering
sources on all the political and economic turmoil during this period of time.
4.The early-mid 1950s Chinese Political Movements Databases, published in December 2014, covering
sources on the Land Reform, the Thought Reform, and the Three Socialist Transformation.
Available from Universities Service Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database
The Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database (1957–)
•Original documents including CCP notices, instr uctions,
proclamations, speeches and major media commentaries with detailed
citations;
•First hand sources to tally 50,000,000 words with nearly 40%
increasing and collating compared with its CD-ROM edition in 2002,
and Online edition in 2006;
•Newly added two Parts, “VIII. Miscellaneous Cultural Revolution
Chronicles” and “VIIII. Special Archives: Self-Examinations,
Confessions, Appeals, Guilty Pleas, Testaments/Suicide Notes and etc.
during the Cultural Revolution;”
•Comprehensive and accurate primary sources: more than 10,000
entries, including government documents, directives, bulletins,
speeches by Mao Zedong and other officials, major newspaper
and magazine editorials, published “Rightist” views and their
denunciations, and original archives of the Anti-Rightist Campaign;
• Valuable historical records: with nearly 5,000 original Rightist files and
articles labeled “Rightist” at the time;
•Related contemporaneous materials: also in the collection are
documents from political movements closely related to the AntiRightist Campaign.
Available from Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
The Chinese Great Leap Forward Great Famine Database (1958–1962)
• More than 7,000 documents, including CCP directives, bulletins,
internal reports, officials’ speeches, and major media commentaries
with detailed citations;
• First-hand sources totalling 30 million words meticulously collated;
• Material of rare value, of which 50% is from internal archives at various
levels, including 3,000 highly classified records and investigative
reports filed during the Great Famine;
• Covering a larger context of the Great Leap Forward and the
Great Famine with inclusion of documents on such policies and
campaigns as the state monopoly on grain purchase and marketing,
the Collectivization of Agriculture, the Campaign to Eliminate
Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Debate on “Red and Expert,” the
“Dual-Antis” Campaign, the Campaign to “Open One’s Heart to the
Party,” and the Campaign to “Pull Out White Flags and Erect Red
Flags”.
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□ The Chinese Political Campaigns in the 1950s: From Land Reform to the State-Private Partnership (1949-1956)
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