People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1909–1969 ○ Died in prison

Ming historian and Beijing vice-mayor whose play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office became the fuse of the Cultural Revolution

A Chinese historian of the Ming dynasty who served as vice-mayor of Beijing after 1949. In November 1965 he fell from power when his play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was attacked as an anti-Mao allegory; the fallout also purged Beijing mayor Peng Zhen. He died in prison in 1969.

A Ming historian from Zhejiang and a student of Hu Shih, he was active in the Democratic League in the 1940s and after 1949 served as vice-mayor of Beijing for culture and education. His 1961 play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, written at Mao’s own suggestion, told of an upright official dismissed by the emperor; in November 1965 Yao Wenyuan’s attack on it as a “poisonous weed” defending Peng Dehuai was the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution. Arrested in 1966, he died in prison in 1969; his wife and daughter also died in the persecution. He was rehabilitated in 1979.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1940–

The Xinhua reporter who lost his father to the famine and, in Tombstone, documented 36 million Great Famine deaths

A Xinhua reporter who from the mid-1990s raided provincial archives to compile the first detailed account of the Great Famine, published in 2008 as Tombstone: 36 million dead.

From Hubei, he watched his adoptive father starve in the Great Leap famine of 1959 without knowing it was a nationwide disaster. As a Xinhua reporter he began in the 1990s to search archives and interview survivors across the country, and after more than a decade published Tombstone in Hong Kong in 2008. The book estimates about 36 million famine deaths in 1958–1962 and traces them to the communes, forced procurement and “anti-rightist” politics; it is banned on the mainland. His history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, followed in 2016. He was deputy publisher of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu.