Comment on and Return the History to its Fact

Written by Yu Youjun and published by Guangdong Education Publishing House in 2011, Socialism in China: 1919-1965, with nearly 600 thousand words in total, has four features as follows.

1. Full and accurate historical data, well-documented argument. To write this book, the author not only read nearly 40 million words, including various published compilation of historical data and related achievements in research conducted both at home and abroad, and made good use of them, but also made a field trip to old revolutionary base areas and the places where the important historical events took place to research and collect oral and documented materials, including Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu, Sichuan, Anhui, Hebei, Guangdong, Hunan, Shanxi, etc. Therefore, the book is well-grounded and fully substantiated.

2. Respect for history, return to its fact. In the past, as archives and records were not totally opened to the public, cognitive deviation towards the history of socialism in China existed in domestic scholars and masses of the people. The author of the book corrected the past persistent mistaken ideas in cognition after carefully sorting out and distinguishing a great deal of historical data. For example, the author presents historical materials and makes his own judgment unperturbedly on the issues, such as the movement for elimination of counter-revolutionaries of Chinese Soviet Areas of Central Committee, the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, and the severe famine in 1959-1961. The author has fulfilled respecting for history and returning to its fact as the book discusses the sensitive events and problems concerning socialism in Chinese history thoroughly.

3. Break through outworn opinions, bring forward novel perspectives, with strong ideological content and high academic value. Based on full and accurate historical materials and from the standpoint of returning history to its fact, the book put forward an objective and pertinent analysis and evaluation on the history of socialism in China.

The book brings out the author’s cogitative and unique point of view regarding a variety of problems on socialism in Chinese history; therefore, the book presents a lot of fresh and novel ideas and not to echo the views of others.

4. The organic unity of academic research and prevalence. To popularize the academic research fruits to broad commonalty is a very hot issue frequently discussed among the current academic field. The book has made helpful attempt and research on this issue. The masses of the people have their own comprehensive ability and language habit; hence, in order to make them accept the academic research achievements, the fruits should be popular but elegant, vivid but scientific. The book has adopted Zhanghui style to depict the history of socialism in China vividly, enhancing the readability of the whole book.

After publishing, the book has been reprinted three times in one year and issued 200 thousand volumes totally and gained great academic appraisement.