Zhang Yihe

In January 2007, Wu Shulin, the deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publications, had read out a list of books that "violated regulations." Her volume was third on the list. Wu told the publishers: "We have reminded you repeatedly about this person. Her books are not to be published ... you dared to publish it. This book is banned because of that person." The publishing house, Hunan Literature Publishers, was then punished.

Having grown up in a family of intellectuals quintessential to the experience of the early years of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhang had first-hand access to the political and culture figures of the 1950s and 1960s. Her memoir-style work of the early 2000s—which differed considerably from the state-sanctioned, cathartic "scar literature' of the 1970s and 1980s—was groundbreaking is providing an objective expose of the "unimaginable cruelty and atrocity of political movements and the actions of the authorities who created the environment for the Red Guards and the Gang of Four to commit their crimes."

Zhang Yihe (Chinese: 章诒和; pinyin: Zhāng Yíhé, born 1942) is a Chinese writer and historian. She is the daughter of writer Zhang Bojun, an intellectual denounced as a "rightist" during Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Movement in the 1950s. She is a graduate of the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts. She is the author of a history of early figures in the Republic of China, and of Lingren Wangshi, a history of Peking opera stars.