Bibliographical Essay

Until the 1990s, because of restricted access to the Party archives and other essential primary sources, there had been no in-depth analysis that had scrutinised violence in revolutionary China.

This position began to change in 1989 when the news of armed violence against unarmed students on Tiananmen Square shocked the world. Gradually, in the 1990s, a bleaker picture of the pre-1957 PRC history began to appear. An increasing number of Chinese as well as Western scholars began to challenge the image of the pre-1957 ‘Golden Years'. In the 1990s, in part triggered by similar developments in the former Soviet Union and its east European ex-satellites, changes took place in the PRC archives. The 1990 new archival regulation (revised in May 1999) theoretically made documents more than thirty years old available for public access. In practice, however, a great number of documents were and still are classified as ‘unsuitable' for public access and remain as ‘closed' files. After autumn 2012, greater restrictions were introduced by the State Archives Administration of China (SAAC), which made it difficult for researchers to read documents from the period of 1949 to 1979. The short wiiidowof opeintessbetweeii the 1990s and 2012, however, allowed Chinese as well as Western scholars in the humanities and social sciences access to a great mass of declassified original Party and other sources on the PRC's first three decades. This newly unearthed information, often in conjunction with newly available documentary materials in other countries, transformed the ability to study, understand and explain the social, economic and political history of the PRC under Mao. This resulted in a far more critical view of the Chinese communist revolution and the early PRC history. In this reappraisal, we learn that coercion and violence existed throughout the Mao era from the early PRC to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden's Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), for example, showed that during and after the Great Leap Famine (1958-62), intra- and inter-village clashes erupted and spilled over into violence.

Frank Dikotter's major history of the Great Leap Famine, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), argued that violence was the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward. There was widespread violence on the local level throughout the famine period. The argument presented by Dikotter was further reinforced by Zhou Xun's companion volumes. Using first-hand oral interviews with survivors as well as previously unseen Party archival documents, Zhou Xun's Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) and The Great Famine of China, 1958-62: A Documentary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) allowed readers to see for themselves that the sheer extremity of violence that took place during the Great Leap Forward famine was beyond doubt.