The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. For fifteen years, he was a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. In 2015, he resigned under official pressure. Yang currently serves on the editorial board of Economic Reference, while continuing to write political commentaries. For his groundbreaking work Tombstone (FSG, 2012), Yang won Sweden’s Stieg Larsson prize for journalistic courage in 2015, and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, presented by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University in 2016. Tombstone also won the Manhattan Institute’s 2013 Hayek Prize and the 2013 Lemkin Award of the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Yang Jisheng lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.

Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for nearly 18 years. A long-time journalist, Mosher currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn.

Guo Jian is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980’s.