People of the Revolution and the USSR
- Hu Shih 胡适 The liberal of the New Culture Movement who led the vernacular-language campaign and later served the Nationalists as a diplomat
- Tsiang Tingfu 蒋廷黻 The Nationalist diplomat whose presence at the Security Council table triggered the Soviet walkout
- Wu Han 吴晗 Ming historian and Beijing vice-mayor whose play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office became the fuse of the Cultural Revolution
- Yang Jisheng 杨继绳 The Xinhua reporter who lost his father to the famine and, in Tombstone, documented 36 million Great Famine deaths
- Shen Zhihua 沈志华 A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives
- Gao Hua 高华 Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement