Yang Kuisong

People’s Republic of China state institutions Marxism–Leninism 1953–

Historian of the Chinese Communist Party and Sino-Soviet relations, professor at East China Normal University

Born in October 1953, he took a bachelor’s degree in party history at Renmin University in 1982. He worked as an editor at the Central Party School in 1982–1987 and was a professor of party history at Renmin University in 1987–1990. He then became a researcher in contemporary history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a professor of history at Peking University, and is now a professor of history at East China Normal University and a researcher at its Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities. He studies the history of the CCP, Sino-Soviet and KMT–CCP relations and socialist thought. In 2008 he argued that executions in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries far exceeded the official 712,000, because local officials concealed them after Mao criticised excessive killing.