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.
Career timeline
- 1968–2001Reporter for the Xinhua News Agency
A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives
In 1995 he spent over a million yuan of his own money to buy declassified Russian archives, which he then opened to fellow scholars free of charge.
Shen Zhihua is a historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet relations who led the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University. He expanded the documentary basis of Chinese Cold War scholarship by personally collecting declassified Russian materials and editing large archival compilations. His work explains the Sino-Soviet split through the interaction of state interests and competition within the international communist movement, questioning accounts that reduce China’s choices to ideological solidarity alone. His studies of the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet alliance trace the calculations of China, the Soviet Union, and Korea, bringing a major Chinese interpretation of the Cold War to an international readership.
Career timeline
- 1950Born in Beijing
- 1971–1978Worker and propaganda cadre at Shijingshan Power Plant
- 1978–1982Graduate student in world history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
- 1983–1984Imprisoned on a state-secrets charge, released early
- 1993–2002Founded a private historical research center and edited Soviet archival collections
- 2004–presentLifelong professor and director of the Cold War International History Studies Center at East China Normal University
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.
Career timeline
- 1978–2011Professor of history, Nanjing University
