ar_liang2022:卢比奥原贴:The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
热爱维C的谦牧: 老李,下午好。我是一名小鎮青年,現在待業在家,提升自己。很遺憾當初以這種方式認識你,我多麼希望與你面對面交流。可惜人的生命只有一次,不像遊戲一樣可以復活無數次。老李,那邊的世界跟這邊的世界一樣嗎?老李,那邊的世界是不是充滿 peace and love?This world is full of human evil……我累了
A Survivor Looks Back at China’s Most Notorious Labor Camp
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 This background gave him access to key historical documents and individuals.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.
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.
大家好,欢迎收听今天的《你那边几点》。我是歪脑驻台湾的特约记者Freya。近几年在中国,脱口秀尤其是单口喜剧,成为备受年轻人喜欢的娱乐方式,线上综艺和线下演出蓬勃发展的。同时也多次掀起舆论风波。言论审查一直是高悬在脱口秀行业从业者头上的达摩克利斯之剑。同时在海外年轻华人纷纷拥抱这一冒犯的艺术,用中文或英文表演单口喜剧,华语脱口秀具乐部也在世界各地涌现,那么在中国国内和海外讲脱口秀有哪些不同?一场优秀的脱口秀表演,最重要的特质是什么?在海外讲脱口秀就完全自由了吗?今天我们邀请了三位华人脱口秀演员一起来聊聊这个话题。他们分别是现在在华盛顿的Victoria Hi Victoria,你好。
Vickie:我当初开始的时候,我其实就只是很喜欢去看表演。然后那个时候上海有一个 Comedy Club叫做 Kung Fu Comedy,然后我去看了很多场表演,但是一场,一场看下来就是2017年。那个时候大部分讲脱口秀的还是白人,男性为主,特别是英文场。然后我就听了很多老外抱怨中国女生很神经病之类的。啧,一些笑话就刻板的,因为听不下去。然后对一些刻板印象我就听不下去。就觉得说那我是不是,既然我能讲英文,我是不是也应该上台反驳一下。这是当初的一个小小的初衷然后。所以在上海讲了几年,在上海讲了五年,然后两年前回到台湾然后今年才搬到纽约。
杨曜恺:他们已经到了那个年纪,尤其结了婚之后,会将子女的尊重看得非常重要,其中最引以为荣的,就是老了之后,子女给钱花这件事(就像在《叔·叔》里,柏收到儿子给的家用后,那个感动溢于言表的一幕)。那是一种非常中国人的心态。很多人以为中国人吝于感情的表达,其实情感都隐藏在细节里。我们不会像外国人一样天天“I love you”,但中国人是会通过一些细微的看似不起眼的行为,去表达爱意。