The Grassroots Chinese History Archive (GCHA) aims to facilitate research by scholars worldwide in modern Chinese history, with a focus on the social, political, and cultural history of China's 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
GCHA contains grassroots documents that the team collected from flea markets and vendors, mostly in the city of Tianjin, between 2003 and 2011. Some files were created by mass organizations and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s. Many others were created and later discarded by offices and archives in China because these places have determined that they are no longer worth keeping. For more about these files, see the descriptions of the following collections: Tianjin's Cultural Revolution; Four Cleanups; and Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius. For more about the collection process, see "Finding and Using Grassroots Historical Sources from the Mao Era."
GCHA also contains the Chen Xiuliang and Sha Wenhan Family Collection, featuring files related to the life and careers of Chen Xiuliang (1907–1998), who served as the Zhejiang Provincial Minister of Propaganda during the 1950s, and Sha Wenhan (1908–1964), who was governor of Zhejiang Province during the 1950s. More information about the Chen-Sha Collection can be found at this page.
This project has been generously supported by the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab of the Simon Fraser University Library, the SFU David Lam Centre, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the SFU Library Scholarly Digitization Fund, the SFU Work-Study Program, and the SFU History Department. The project team respectfully acknowledges that the project was completed and is hosted on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the Tseil-Watuth, Squamish, Musqueam, and Kwikwetlem peoples.