Skip to main content
China Unofficial
  • About us
  • Explore
  • Map
  • Creators
  • Newsletter
  • Contact us
  • Resources
  • En
  • Zh
  • About us
  • Explore
  • Map
  • Creators
  • Newsletter
  • Contact us
  • Resources

Explore the collection

Showing 8 items in the collection

Use these filters to explore the collection

  • Theme

    • Oral and Personal Accounts (163)
    • History of the Chinese Communist Party (142)
    • Civil Society (112)
    • History of Unofficial Thought (91)
    • The Cultural Revolution (67)
    • Intellectuals (63)
    • The Great Leap Forward/The Great Famine (60)
    • Freedom of Speech and Press (59)
    • Advocacy of Democratic Rights (57)
    • Communist Party Political System (52)
    • Famine (46)
    • The Anti-Rightist Campaign (46)
    • 1989 Tiananmen Protests and Suppression (42)
    • Mao Zedong (41)
    • Justice and Human Rights (41)
    • Women and Feminism (39)
    • Farmers' Rights and Rural Issues (25)
    • Early Communist Party (24)
    • Intra-Party Conflict and Purges (19)
    • Public Health (19)
    • Everyday Life in China (19)
    • Gender and Sexuality (12)
    • COVID-19 (11)
    • Labor (11)
    • Economic System and Reform (11)
    • Faith-Based Crackdown and Persecution (10)
    • Education (10)
    • Ethnic Minorities (9)
    • Religion and Faith (8)
    • Chinese Petitioning System (5)
    • Natural Disasters (5)
    • Land Reform (1947-1953) (4)
    • White Paper Movement (4)
    • Liberalism (3)
    • Disability (3)
    • The Three Gorges Dam Project (2)
    • Demolition and Displacement (1)
    • Environment (1)

  • Type

    • Book (169)
    • Film and Video (105)
    • Article (42)
    • Periodicals (8)
    • Official Documents (6)
    • Database (2)
    • Exhibits (1)

  • Creator

    • Tiger Temple (61)
    • Ai Xiaoming (20)
    • Hu Jie (18)
    • The General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists (6)
    • Eva (4)
    • Gao Hua (4)
    • Xiang Chengjian (4)
    • Hu Ping (3)
    • Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (3)
    • Jiang Xue (3)
    • Li Rui (3)
    • Lin Zhao (3)
    • Wu Yisan (3)
    • Xu Youyu (3)
    • Yang Jisheng (3)
    • 中国劳工通讯 (3)
    • 韩东方 (3)
    • Bao Pu (2)
    • Chen Yung-fa (2)
    • Cui Weiping (2)
    • Dai Qing (2)
    • Ding Shu (2)
    • Feng Yuan (2)
    • Gan Cui (2)
    • He Qinglian (2)
    • Jin Hui (2)
    • Li Jianglin (2)
    • Liao Yiwu (2)
    • Liu Wenzhong (2)
    • Liu Xiaobo (2)
    • Shen Yuan (2)
    • Song Yongyi (2)
    • Wang Lixiong (2)
    • Wang Nianyi (2)
    • Wang Ruoshui (2)
    • Wang Xiaolin (2)
    • Wu Renhua (2)
    • Wu Wenjun (2)
    • Xiao Shu (2)
    • Yang Kuisong (2)
    • Yang Xianhui (2)
    • Yang Xiaokai (2)
    • #MeToo in China Archives volunteers (1)
    • Book (1)
    • Bu Weihua (1)
    • Canadian Embassy in China (1)
    • Chang, Jung (1)
    • Chen Bin (1)
    • Chen Cheng (1)
    • Chen Feng (1)

  • Era

    • Reform Era (1978-2012) (167)
    • Maoist Era (1949-1978) (131)
    • The Cultural Revolution Period (1966-1976) (68)
    • The Great Leap Forward/Great Famine Period (1958-1962) (52)
    • The Anti-Rightist Campaign Period (1957-1958) (48)
    • Xi Jinping Era (2013 —) (36)
    • Republic of China Period (1912-1949) (33)
    • Yan’an Period (1935-1948) (11)
    • The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) (8)
    • Chinese Soviet Republic Period/ (1928-1937) (7)
    • The First Kuomintang-Communist Civil War (1927-1937) (5)
    • The Second Kuomintang-Communist Civil War (1945-1949) (5)

8 items

Film and Video

Enemy of the State

On February 9, 2010, Tan Zuoren was tried in the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court for the crime of inciting subversion against the state. Ai Xiaoming and her team recorded the three days before and after the verdict, the mindsets of Tan Zuoren’s friends and relatives, and how the lawyers carried out their work. This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Film and Video

Let the Sunshine Reach the Earth

Wang Lihong is a Beijing netizen, civilian journalist, and public service volunteer. Wang was accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for supporting three netizens in Fujian. On August 12, 2011, the case was heard for the first time in the Wenyuhe Court of the People's Court of Chaoyang District, Beijing. This film includes interviews with Wang Lihong's relatives, friends, defense lawyers and netizens, and records the historical scene of onlookers in the courts. Ai Xiaoming’s film “Postcard,” also released in 2011, elaborates Wang Lihong’s activism in broader strokes, while “Let the Sunshine Reach the Earth” focuses on the process of her trial. This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Film and Video

Postcard

After retiring from her job as a cadre, Wang Lihong fulfilled what she saw as her civic responsibility to become more active in women’s rights in China, especially the protection of their legal rights. In 2009-2010, she became involved in the “Fujian Netizen Case,” which resulted in the arrest of three human rights activists, who all sought to investigate the death of a 25-year-old women believed to have been murdered in a gang rape by men associated with the local police. Wang Lihong wrote letters to the General Secretary of the Fujian Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China every day for nine consecutive days, calling on the authorities to let them go home for the New Year. For this reason, she was criminally detained by the authorities in March 2011 on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." The case was heard by the Beijing, Chaoyang District People's Court on August 12; nearly a month later, on September 9, the court issued a guilty verdict and sentenced Wang Lihong to nine months in prison. The film documents her case, and raises questions about the accountability of the local government and police. Another one of Ai Xiaoming’s films, “Let the Sunshine Reach the Earth,” documents Wang Lihong’s trial process in more detail. This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Film and Video

Taishi Village

In the fall of 2005, residents of Taishi Village became increasingly frustrated and angered by the sale of land by village officials; hundreds of villagers signed a petition calling for the removal of the village chief. The villagers occupied the village committee’s financial office and expressed their demands through sit-ins and other forms of protests. The government dispatched the police to arrest village activists, but the villagers insisted on starting a formal recall process. The government finally sent a team to the village to verify the signatures for the petition.  <i>The Taishi Village</i> recall incident generated attention from Chinese and foreign media, and caused uneasiness among local government officials. On September 12, 2005,  police arrested dozens of villagers who were participating in a sit-in in the village committee room. Despite the pressure, villagers elected a committee to remove the village committee director. The government then dispatched more men to exert pressure, forcing elected members to withdraw one by one. Hired patrol teams eventually drove lawyers and reporters out of the village. This documentary records the protest scenes and tragic ending of Taishi village’s movement for autonomy, and presents the surging rights consciousness in rural areas in Guangdong. This incident demonstrates villagers’ ability to exercise their right to vote and the government’s inertial approach to grassroots democracy movements.  This documentary is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Film and Video

Three Days in Wukan

Wukan is a village in Luwei City, under the jurisdiction of Shanwei City, Guangdong Province. From 2011 to 2016, Wukan villagers have continued to fight to protect their land and fight for villagers' rights. Facing strong pressure from the government, some even paid with their lives. In the process, the villagers had elected their own villagers' committee by one person, one vote to practice their democratic rights. Although the protests were eventually suppressed, the impact was far-reaching. Ai Xiaoming rushed to the scene at the beginning of the Wukan incident and left this precious record.
Film and Video

Why Are Flowers So Red

This film follows the stories of environmental activist Tan Zuoren and artist Ai Weiwei. In July 2009, Tan Zuoren was charged with the crime of “Inciting subversion of state power,” and his trial was held in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Ai Weiwei was invited by Tan’s lawyer to testify in court, but the night before the trial, he was assaulted by the police and detained in a hotel. To everyone’s surprise, Ai turned on the tape recorder before the police entered his residence and managed to record the incident. Later, Ai and his colleagues released a documentary about this incident, titled “Disturbing the Peace” (or “Laoma Tihua”). This film interviews the people behind the scenes of “Disturbing the Peace,” including the director, photographers, editors, and audiences of the film, who discuss the relationship between citizens and government authority. This series of films are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Periodicals

The Ladies Journal

The Ladies Journal was founded in January 1915 by the Commercial Press Shanghai. It was a monthly magazine primarily targeting upper-class women. It ceased publication in 1932 when the Commercial Press was destroyed by Japanese bombing. The magazine was distributed in major cities in China and overseas, such as Singapore. The magazine was considered an influential forum for the dissemination of feminist discourse in modern China, given its long operation and large readership. The magazine spanned important historical periods such as the May Fourth Movement and the National Revolutionary period, and readers can see how the political environment and social trends influenced the political stance and style of the publication. Although it was a women's magazine, the chief editors and the authors of most of the articles were men. According to Wang Zheng, Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies and History at the University of Michigan, the early articles of The Ladies Journal were more conservative. Although it advocated for women’s education, the goal was to train women to be good wives and mothers. Later, under the influence of New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Student Movement, the magazine was forced to reform itself and began to publish debates on women's emancipation as well as to call for more women's contributions, spread liberal feminist ideas, and support women's movements across the country. 1923 saw the beginning of the National Revolutionary period, and the Chinese Communist Party’s nationalist-Marxist discourse on women’s emancipation started to challenge liberal feminism, and the magazine's influence waned. In September 1925, the magazine ceased to be a cutting edge feminist publication after it changed its chief editor again and shifted its focus to ideas more easily accepted by conservative-minded readers,such as women's artistic tastes. Although the <i>The Ladies Journal</i> was run by men, and some articles displayed contempt for and discrimination against women, it pointed out and discussed many issues that hindered women's social progress, such as lack of education, employment, economic independence, marriage freedom, sexual freedom, family reform, emancipation of slave girls, abolition of the child bride system, abolition of prostitution, and contraceptive birth control. It was also open to many different ideas and views, all of which were published. It is a valuable historical source for the study of women's studies and modern Chinese history. Yujiro Murata, a professor at the University of Tokyo, founded the The Ladies Journal Research Society in 2000, along with a number of other colleagues interested in women's history from Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea. The two main goals of the Society are to produce a general catalog of all seventeen volumes of the Magazine and to bring together scholars from all over the world to conduct studies based on the magazine. With the assistance of the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the magazine was made into an online repository, which is stored on the Institute’s “Modern History Databases” website, and can be accessed by the public. Link to the database: https://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/fnzz/index.php. Thanks to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, for authorizing the CUA to repost.
Database

Modern Women Journals Database

This database is part of the “Modern History Databases,” operated by the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The "Women and Gender History Research Group" of the Institute endeavors to collect, digitize and categorize related books and journals from libraries worldwide, and established the Modern Women Journals Database, which consists of 214 journals and 110,000 individual items. The database has been made available for public use since 2015. In 1919 and the years that followed, women’s movement in China was on the rise, and as a result, many women's magazines appeared, a lot of which were run by women. Most of the journals collected in this repository were published between 1907-1949, with some published after 1949; there are comprehensive publications, as well as those focusing particularly on women's movements, family, health, employment, etc.; nearly a quarter of the publications were published in Shanghai, followed by Beijing, Guangzhou, and Nanjing. As can be seen from the Database, most of these journals have a relatively short duration, ranging from one to five years. Through this database, readers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the history of women and women’s movements in modern China. In addition to browsing journals and searching the database, users can also conduct author research and journal analysis. Under the author research section, users can read author biographies, as well as see the number of articles written by a particular author, and a map displaying their family and social relations. Under the journal research section, users can generate maps by keywords, eras, and article categories, which can provide more multi-dimensional information about a specific era or topic. Link to the database:https://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/magazine/web/acwp_index.php. Thanks to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, for authorizing the CUA to repost.
Displaying results 1–8 of 8
  • «
  • 1(current)
  • »
  • About us
  • Explore
  • Map
  • Creators
  • Newsletter
  • Contact us
  • Resources
© China Unofficial Archive