On August 19, 1991, hardline Communist leaders staged a coup in Moscow to depose USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That evening, 4,000 miles to the east, Gao Hua, a thirty-seven-year-old Nanjing University lecturer listening intently to the coup leaders’ emergency announcements and stirring Soviet music blaring from an old transistor radio, penned the first words of the book that was to become How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. Compelled by a sense of mission to write a true history of Yan'an, which has long been enshrined as one of the foundational myths of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Gao took great risks to write a book that might never see the light of day. “Had I worried about its publication, this book would not have been written at all,” Gao told independent documentary filmmaker Hu Jie and this reviewer in 2009....

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