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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Book Review|
November 01 2019
How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945
How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945
. By Gao Hua. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. Hong Kong
: Chinese University Press
, 2018
. xx, 812 pp. ISBN: 9789629968229 (cloth).
David Cheng Chang
David Cheng Chang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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Journal of Asian Studies (2019) 78 (4): 898–902.
Citation
David Cheng Chang; How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. Journal of Asian Studies 1 November 2019; 78 (4): 898–902. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911819001335
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