The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database. By Edited and compiled by the Editorial Board of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, editor-in-chief Song Yongyi. CD-ROM with hard copy indexes in Chinese and English. [Hong Kong: Universities' Service Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. 80 MB+index 384 pp. $1,000.00. ISBN 962-996-071-0.]

Extract

What will not be lost on students of revolutionary chromatography is the fact that the hard cover index accompanying this CD-ROM is a huge black book. In the professional jargon of Cultural Revolutionary historians everywhere, The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database is already being referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as the hei cailiao – “black materials” – of editor-in-chief, Song Yongyi. Readable on most MS Windows platforms capable of displaying Chinese characters, it comes with a built-in search-engine and comprises nearly 30 million words. Suddenly, it is as if Eric Hobsbawm already had China's Cultural Revolution – and not merely the former Soviet Union – in mind when he observed, after the fall of the wall, that “Inadequacy of sources is the last thing we can complain about” (On History, p. 239).