Why did working with Xianhui Yang on the events at Jiabiangou pique your interest?
A. Yang Xianhui’s book, Woman from Shanghai, with brutal honesty chronicles the sufferings of 3,000 intellectuals and former government officials inside a labor camp called “Jiabiangou” near the Gobi Desert between 1958 and 1961. Those prisoners were labeled as “Rightists” because many of them had expressed views which dissented from Chairman Mao’s Communist policies. With a purportedly noble goal of “reforming their thinking through hard labor,” the Chinese government successfully purged political dissidents from the country and created a living hell for the Rightists. In a short span of three years, about eighty percent of the Rightists died of exhaustion or starvation. When I first heard about these stories, I was shocked. I was born and raised in China, and these tragic tales came as a new revelation to me. Like many Chinese, I grew up reading the government version of the anti-Rightist campaign, and nowhere in these stories was there any mention of brutal persecution. The governme
