Contemporary Chinese Historian Feng Ke's Trilogy: The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao Zedong's Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution

THE PEOPLE'S TRILOGY: The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao's Great Famine, The Cultural Revolution

Contemporary Chinese historian Feng Ke's classic of the era: The People's Trilogy

This authoritative masterpiece rewrites modern Chinese history and is a must-read for understanding 20th-century Chinese history.



Recording the horrors of authoritarian rule

The cruel truth that the Chinese Communist Party is unwilling to disclose

An important masterpiece that speaks for the contemporary Chinese people



▌Trilogy Part 1: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

〈The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Communist Revolution, 1945-1957〉



★The Sunday Times History Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Owell Prize★

Best-selling historical biography author Jung Chang: This is a must-read book.



The latest perspective on writing the history of the Chinese revolution from the people's perspective!

Uncover the truth about the founding of the People’s Republic of China by uncovering Mao Zedong’s propaganda mask!

The history of the people speaking out carries a weight of life that official history cannot bear.

A large amount of evidence from Chinese archives reveals the horrific truth of the Golden Age!



The Chinese Communist Party called its 1949 victory "liberation," a term often associated with images of jubilant crowds taking to the streets to celebrate the return of freedom. However, in China, the story of "liberation" and "revolution" is not one of peace, freedom, or justice, but rather one of orchestrated terror and organized violence. After liberation, the vast majority of Chinese people faced "a meticulously designed Auschwitz ideological concentration camp." Less than a decade after the Communist regime came to power, no one dared to oppose Chairman Mao.



Landlords bore the brunt of the attack. The Communist Party's land reform in the countryside was essentially a bloody bargain between the Party and the poor, a carefully orchestrated massacre that resulted in the liquidation of two million landlords. This was followed by a campaign of terror to suppress counter-revolutionaries, aimed at eliminating all enemies of the Party. Mao Zedong even set a killing target. To achieve this, officials often randomly selected their victims, ultimately resulting in the deaths of nearly two million people. Then came ethnic minorities, religious groups, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, business owners, teachers, scholars, and Party members who questioned various policies...



The protagonists of "The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957 (A Trilogy by Contemporary Chinese Historian Feng Ke)" are ordinary people affected by this devastating catastrophe. Their stories have been largely lost to history, as official propaganda is filled with speeches by leaders that depict only a blueprint for the society they wanted to build, often reflecting only exemplary workers and farmers, rather than flesh-and-blood ordinary people.



Contemporary Chinese historian Feng Ke, author of "The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976," draws on archival materials only recently made public. His collection of hundreds of previously unclassified documents from various Chinese archives includes secret police reports, unaltered speeches by senior leaders, confessions written during the thought reform movement, investigations into rural rebellions, detailed statistics on the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, surveys of workers' working conditions, and letters from ordinary people visiting the country. Supplemented with memoirs, letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, he paints a vivid picture of the revolution's key participants and victims.



The testimonies left by these early eyewitnesses are often ignored by scholars sympathetic to the Communist regime. However, their accounts can now be cross-correlated with archival materials, significantly contributing to the study of historical truth. Through the stories of these ordinary, flesh-and-blood individuals, readers are given an unprecedented opportunity to penetrate the surface of CCP propaganda and encounter the most devastating tragedy of the era under Mao Zedong's regime.



Part Two of the Trilogy: Mao Zedong's Great Famine: A History of China's Disaster, 1958-1962

〈Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962〉



★Samuel Johnson Prize-winning work from the UK★

This authoritative masterpiece rewrites modern Chinese history and is a must-read for understanding 20th-century Chinese history.



A famine that claimed at least 45 million lives: was it a natural disaster or a man-made one?

A remarkable historical investigation that reveals one of the worst crimes in world history



"This book is more terrifying than anything you have ever read. The dehumanization of people, especially those dominated by ideology, makes every page unbearable to read... It is shocking... Feng Ke has done a service to history and to the Chinese people - when they are able to read this book one day." - Bloomberg Businessweek



The craziest, darkest, and most tragic page in modern Chinese history

Decoding and Reconstructing the Truth of the Greatest Man-Made Tragedy of the 20th Century



From 1958 to 1962, China became a living hell. Mao Zedong pushed the nation into a frenzy of progress, attempting to catch up with and surpass Britain within 15 years. This experiment ultimately led to a catastrophe unprecedented in Chinese history, claiming the lives of tens of millions.



With brilliant prose and rich detail, Feng Ke presents a history that has been widely speculated but never fully understood. He pored over extensive archives of the Communist Party of China—not only central archives but also provincial archives, and local municipal and county archives. These materials include confidential Public Security Bureau reports, detailed minutes of high-level Party meetings, unedited original speeches by key leaders, surveys of rural work, investigations into mass killings, confidential public opinion surveys, and letters of denunciation from ordinary citizens. For a long time, these archives were kept secret, accessible only to a handful of the Party's most trusted historians. However, after the promulgation of the Archives Law, thousands of central and local archives were opened to the public, radically changing the way people study the Mao era. It was through these archives that Feng Ke was able to piece together a period of the past that Chinese officials desperately wanted to forget and conceal.



After the English edition of this book was published, it immediately attracted international attention and discussion, and even won the Samuel Johnson Prize (later renamed the Baillie Gifford Prize), the most representative non-fiction book award in the UK. The judging panel highly praised the book, with one commenting, "This book is not only important today, but will also become even more important as China becomes increasingly influential and valued in the world." Another commentator stated that Feng Ke's work completely changed his understanding of the 20th century. In the past, when the Western world discussed the disasters brought about by dictatorial regimes in the 20th century, it mostly focused on Hitler and Stalin. However, the book "Mao Zedong's Great Famine" alerted many Western readers that such a tragic history had also occurred in contemporary China.



Mao Zedong envisioned the Great Leap Forward as a way to elevate China to a superpower and demonstrate the power of communism to the world. Ultimately, his ambitions were futile and failed. However, no one had ever demonstrated this so clearly before Feng Ke. The Great Leap Forward ultimately became "one of the largest mass killings in human history"—at least 40 to 50 million people died from overwork, starvation, and beatings. Furthermore, it caused the largest-scale destruction of buildings in human history and brought catastrophic damage to the natural environment. Through extensive archival research and insider interviews, Feng Ke uses vivid narrative to connect the inside stories of the decision-making level with the daily lives of the people, giving voice to the dead and the weak. This writing style is unprecedented in the study of similar topics. It deeply excavates the dark side of the government that is closest to historical facts, which is horrifying and makes people sigh in admiration.



Mao Zedong's Great Famine is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding 20th-century Chinese history. This newly released translation comprehensively corrects the errors and omissions of the original, allowing Feng Ke's classic work to be presented more faithfully to the original for Chinese readers. Decades have passed, but the past is not forgotten. The darkness of that era, the political madness, and the countless innocent lives lost in history will be remembered forever through Feng Ke's writings.



Part Three of the Trilogy: The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976

〈The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976〉



★2016 Financial Times Best History Book Selection★

Examining how the lower classes of Chinese society experienced a magical journey during the Cultural Revolution

More importantly, it buried Maoism.



"The Cultural Revolution was not a mass movement; it was one man using a gun to mobilize the masses." — Wang Rongfen



Beyond the battlefields of Communist Party cadres, government bureaucrats, the People's Liberation Army, and the Red Guards, there lies a story of the Cultural Revolution that truly belongs to ordinary Chinese people. What impact did ordinary Chinese people experience during the decade-long catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution? How did they respond to the top-down campaign of revenge and liquidation waged by Mao Zedong? How did they protect themselves, and even seek new space for survival?



When the revolution violently shook the various grassroots collective organizations and power structures that had been formed since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the planned economic system also unexpectedly collapsed, a result that Mao Zedong had not anticipated.



Feng Ke's "The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976" describes why China's proletarian Cultural Revolution occurred, how it evolved, and what trauma and legacy it left behind. From the perspective of grassroots Chinese people, this book reveals the truth about the Cultural Revolution from 1962 to 1976. This approach, grounded in a people's historical perspective, is distinct from previous studies. This book draws on documents from hundreds of archives, most of which are used here for the first time. These include detailed accounts of Red Guard victims, politically clean data, rural surveys, factory and workshop questionnaires, police reports on the black market, and even letters of complaint from villagers, memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, self-published "self-printed books" (written by grassroots Party members and even ordinary citizens, offering perspectives not seen in official accounts), and interview records. This book attempts to connect the "narrative of grand history" with the "stories" of the men and women who were part of this human tragedy. From the highest echelons of government to the impoverished villagers in remote areas, everyone faced arduous trials, and the choices they made challenged the common perception that hundreds of millions of Chinese were remarkably homogeneous during the final decade of Mao's era. In reality, their collective actions ultimately pushed the country in a direction completely different from what Mao envisioned: rather than attacking the remnants of bourgeois culture, they overturned the planned economy and hollowed out the Party's ideology.



In his book "The Cultural Revolution," Feng Ke argues that after Stalin's death, Mao Zedong believed he had become the supreme leader of world socialism, a historical position he sought. To prove this, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958, which resulted in a disastrous defeat, for which many comrades and old comrades held Mao responsible.



Mao Zedong was deeply resentful of this, and after years of reflection, he took action again, launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. This was a political movement born out of Mao's personal resentment and anger. He called on young people to rise up and fight for him, eliminating the "capitalist roaders," "revisionists," and "class enemies" who had been lurking within the Party for unknown periods of time, and directed the Red Guards' attacks against the political enemies he wanted to avenge.



But his political enemies were far from helpless. They had already mastered the art of division and deflection, splintering the Red Guards into numerous factions, each engaged in a relentless internal struggle over who was truly the public enemy. Mao Zedong, of course, could not afford to give up, so he called on all Chinese to join the Cultural Revolution, escalating the movement to an unprecedented scale, overwhelming the land and bringing the chaos to near-civil war levels.



In 1968, the military, led by Lin Biao, emerged to seize control of the chaotic situation, shifting state power from the Party to the military. As Lin Biao's influence grew, Mao Zedong's suspicions grew, ultimately leading to his defection and death.



The Cultural Revolution traumatized both the Party and the military. However, the grassroots, hardened by their experience of hardship, gradually developed their own coping strategies, breaking free from the constraints of collective organizations and gradually burying the planned economy, thus opening the door for Deng Xiaoping's reforms.



Book Review (Excerpt)



The greatest value of Feng Ke's book is that it is not just a collection of horrific statistics... He explains very clearly how the post-revolutionary state operated, the extent of the violence that followed the revolution, why people killed each other, and the purpose of the atrocities. - The New York Review of Books



A significant work of archival research... Feng Ke skillfully weaves the voices of the people into his book, imbuing it with a powerfully human dimension. —Financial Times



▌Brilliantly researched, with a sharp eye for that tumultuous and elusive era, Feng Ke tells us a tale of horrific and incredible suffering. —Kirkus Reviews



The frenzy of that era tore apart friendships and family ties, not to mention the CCP itself. Feng Ke's work powerfully conveys this point. - The Times



▌A brilliant work, anyone interested in modern Chinese history should read it, as should anyone concerned with how authoritarian leaders can bring about a national disaster by spreading a simple idea. ——The Observer

2021-07-01

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