1954.5.12.–2011.12.26.
○ Liver cancer
Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement
His How the Red Sun Rose (2000) reconstructed the Yan'an Rectification Movement from party documents and memoirs, treating it as the process through which Mao consolidated personal authority and fixed the party's later methods.
Born in Nanjing, he grew up watching his father persecuted as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and taught modern Chinese history at Nanjing University. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, published in Hong Kong in 2000, reconstructed the movement of 1942–1945 from published sources alone, showing how Mao concentrated the party’s power in himself through thought reform, cadre screening and the “rescue campaign”, and set the template for later political campaigns. Banned on the mainland but widely read there, he died of liver cancer in 2011.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1978–2011Professor of history, Nanjing University
Related historical events
Researching CCP history with limited access to official sources
Trained as a historian of Republican China, Gao expanded his work into the history of the Chinese Communist Party, a subject regarded as academically sensitive in China. Without access to government research funding or official archives, he examined published materials to write How the Red Sun Rose. According to a retrospective by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he wrote in his home kitchen at night after his family had gone to sleep. The work took seven years and appeared in 2000, attracting acclaim in academic circles. Against the background of his and his family’s experience of persecution during the Cultural Revolution, Gao studied the 1942–44 Yan’an Rectification Movement as a key to the political roots of that later upheaval and as a process through which Mao Zedong consolidated power inside the Party. Gao’s analysis describes the movement as reorganizing the Party leadership and redistributing power in Mao’s favor. This interpretation should be read alongside the fact that his research relied on published material; stronger characterizations in one review are the reviewer’s account of Gao’s argument, not independent verified facts.