Chapter 144 postscript

"Historical Elegy - The History of the Anti-Rightists" is a book that has been written for many years.The first three chapters were written with a pen.It was put on hold for a long time after it was written.Later, when I started writing this book again, I was already writing on a computer.Therefore, only the first three chapters of this book have manuscripts, and the latter are computer floppy disks.Now I have finally finished the whole book and settled a concern. For me, the "Anti-Rightist Movement" was the first "class struggle education class" in my life.In 1957, I was busy applying for university entrance exams, so I had little to do with Da Ming Da Fang and the later "Anti-Rightist Movement".In autumn, when I came to the capital Beijing from the seaside town of Wenzhou, and entered Peking University, the first lesson was "Anti-Rightists"!Peking University is one of the "base camps" of "rightists", with more than 500 "rightists".As a naive person, I participated in various struggle meetings and chanted slogans such as "repel the rampant attacks of bourgeois rightists"... Only then did I understand what "class struggle" is.Since then, the "Anti-Rightist Movement" has left an indelible impression on me.

In November 1979, when I went to Beijing to attend the Fourth Cultural Congress, I accepted the task of interviewing and writing the reportage of Professor Fu Ying, which brought me into contact with the subject of "anti-rightism" for the first time.Professor Fu Ying is familiar to me, because when I entered Peking University, I was taught by him for a whole year, and he is a typical example of the "centre-right" set up by Mao Zedong in the "Anti-Rightist Movement"... From then on, I kept interviewing "rightists" and relatives of "rightists", and wrote reportage for Luo Longji, Zhang Bojun, Ge Peiqi, Wang Zaoshi, Peng Wenying, Fu Lei, Pang Xunqin, Liushahe, etc.

I started thinking about writing this book.I spent a lot of time in the library, checking the 1957 "People's Daily", "Guangming Daily", "Wen Wei Po", "Liberation Daily", etc., and copied hundreds of reports. Classification of events, as a writing reference. After finishing the desk work, I proceeded to the interview.Traveling all over the world, I interviewed many "rightists", large and small. These tasks were largely completed in 1986.However, I have been slow to start writing this book.As mentioned earlier, I wrote three chapters by hand, but I was interrupted again, and I didn't write any more.The reason for this is that I only interviewed "rightists" and only understood one aspect of the problem, but I didn't know much about the other aspect, that is, how the "anti-rightist movement" was decided, how it was launched, and how it was deployed.

Later, when I was writing the two books "The Biography of Hu Qiaomu", I was exposed to a lot of inside information about the "Anti-Rightist Movement", and finally had a detailed understanding of the launching process of the "Anti-Rightist Movement". In this way, I sat in front of the computer and "knocked out" this book that has been in the works for many years. Due to well-known reasons, although the "Anti-Rightist Movement" has passed for nearly forty years, there has never been a long novel reflecting this "historical tragedy".This book breaks the silence of many years, and for the first time presents the whole process of this elegy in all directions and from multiple angles in front of readers.

The structure of this book adopts the shape of "T" - it focuses on writing the historical cross-section of 1957, and also writes about the later period of the "anti-rightist movement" and the suffering fate of the "rightists", which deepens the understanding of "anti-rightist movement". The sense of depth of the "Rightist Movement" deepens the three-dimensional portrayal of this "Left" catastrophe. In accordance with Sima Qian's spirit of "Don't hide beauty, don't hide evil", this book faithfully reflects the tragic song of 1957, and names those critics, because this is the true face of history, even for the "Honorable Ones" " and "sages", such as Mao Dun, Lao She, Wu Han and so on.

I would like to dedicate this book to the tens of thousands of distorted souls in 1957, and to the many readers who pay attention to the history and destiny of China. May the historical elegy not be repeated again!