From 1956 to 1957, following the Chinese Communist Party’s call for “letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” intellectuals from all walks of life actively offered their opinions and advice to the Party. However, tens of thousands were soon labelled as bourgeois rightists, and accused of launching “vicious attacks against the Party.” Among them, around 3,000 were sent to the state-run Jiabiangou Labor Camp, located in the Gobi Desert near Jiuquan in Gansu Province, for Re-education through Labor.
Those who were sent to Jiabiangou were a small fraction of over 500,000 individuals labeled rightists across the country, but their fates were among the most cruel. Brutal labor and an unprecedented famine turned the camp into a mass grave for more than 2,000. Those who survived carried with them harrowing memories that shadowed the rest of their lives.
In the early 2000s, thanks to China's relatively relaxed environment for free speech, some survivors of Jiabiangou began publishing memoirs and giving interviews to share their experiences, hoping to alert the public and prevent such tragedies from happening again. At the same time, the horrific events at Jiabiangou also drew the attention of journalists and writers. They dedicated substantial time and resources to visiting survivors and the families of victims, researching archival materials, and attempting to reconstruct and bring to light this dark chapter of history.
Worlds Away: A Look Back at Jiabiangou is one such product of this period. The author, Xing Tongyi, spent several years writing it. By uncovering fragments hidden in the crevices of time, he pieced together a relatively complete and reliable historical portrait of Jiabiangou. Xing formerly served as Deputy Secretary of the Jiuquan Municipal Party Committee and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Jiuquan Municipal People’s Congress. This background gave him access to key historical documents and individuals. As a result, the book not only presents oral accounts from those involved but also supplements them with important historical context and information.
For example, through the later director of the Jiabiangou Forest Farm, Xing obtained the “Project Assignment Document” for establishing the Jiabiangou labor farm. Readers can see how a seemingly well-thought-out and reasonable reform-through-labor farm on paper became a death camp.
The location of Jiabiangou Labor Farm on a map of China.
Xing also learned from prosecutors then working at the local procuratorate about more than forty Rightists who were prosecuted for resisting re-education through labor—a subject rarely touched upon in existing literature about the Anti-Rightist Movement. Xing considers these people “the most unfortunate among the unfortunate.” Most of them were prosecuted for stealing food due to starvation, petty theft, or making reactionary remarks.
Their tragic stories give real faces and clarity to otherwise vague historical figures, exposing the cruelty and absurdity of political campaigns. For instance, the book recounts in detail the story of Rightist Ma Shuqin. At the time, a black mule was injured during a fight over food with other animals and later died despite careful treatment. Because the mule was a vital source of labor, the farm submitted a detailed report and requested that the local procuratorate arrest Ma, who was head of the feeding team, on the charge of “sabotaging production,” alleging he caused the fight by stealing animal feed. In stark contrast, countless Rightists died from exhaustion and hunger, their bodies buried without graves, let alone any formal death records.
The firsthand accounts in Worlds Away make clear that the Anti-Rightist Campaign was not, as officially claimed, a well-intentioned but overzealous movement, but a deliberate crackdown on dissent by those in power. Similarly, the Great Famine was not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made catastrophe under an authoritarian regime. Many interviewees in the book, including the author himself, attribute the problems to the Communist Party’s “leftist” mistakes that pushed the Anti-Rightist Campaign to the extreme.
But the experiences of the people profiled in the book show that these so-called Rightist intellectuals were, in fact, loyal supporters of the Communist Party. Their proposals—ranging from opposing bureaucracy and privilege to warning against “one-party dominance”—were precisely meant to help the Party fulfill the promises it made to society when it first came to power. Yet they were punished for speaking out.
Through these personal narratives, we can see that in post-1949 China, a country marked by successive political movements, people from different eras often suffered in strikingly similar ways, all rooted in the same authoritarian logic. When only one voice is allowed in society, those in power can monopolize the truth and “call a mouse a duck,” all in the name of crafting a unified “China story.”
A recent example of this is the strict lockdown policy during the COVID-19 pandemic: while ordinary people struggled to survive under absurd restrictions, the state propagated an illusion of national triumph over the virus, branding anyone trying to tell the truth as an enemy or foreign force. Ironically, during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, some people (such as Li Jinghang, mentioned in the book) were labeled Rightists not for speaking out, but for not speaking enthusiastically enough. School authorities accused him of being “more reactionary by staying silent than by speaking.”
This shows that in the unpredictable tides of political movements, even the basic freedom to remain silent can be stripped away—just like those in late 2022 who could no longer endure and joined the White Paper protests, where even raising a blank sheet of paper became a crime.
By unearthing buried truths, Xing brings the long-silenced protagonists of history to the forefront. Today, the Internet allows individuals to more easily share their stories, but we also face more stringent censorship and increasingly subtle political propaganda. Even so, countless people continue to risk their freedom to document the truth of our time. These invaluable records enable ordinary people across time and space to see and understand each other, to recognize the systemic nature of their own suffering, and to draw strength and guidance in the ongoing struggle for freedom.
Recommended archive:
Xing Tongyi: Worlds Away: A Look Back at Jiabiangou