Zhang ChunYuan

Zhang ChunYuan () was a student of history at Lanzhou University where he was labeled as a rightist during the Hundred Flowers Campaign and subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign. He was sent for Reform through Labor during the Great Leap Forward. He was a first hand witness to mass deaths and starvation, and even cannibalism that was common in Gansu. He is one of the main subjects of Hu Jie's documentary Spark.
Early life
Zhang was known to have served in the People's Liberation Army during the Korean War, where he was wounded in action.
The Lanzhou University Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Clique
Shocked by the horror of the Great Chinese Famine, Zhang became a founder member and leader of the The LanZhou University Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Clique.
In total there were almost forty members, mostly intellectuals, and even the local communist party secretary Du Yinghua. Zhang personally recruited Lin Zhao to the clique.
They published an underground magazine, full of articles critical of the policies that were starving people to death around them, called Spark. After publishing the first edition, the group was discovered, captured, and imprisoned, and most of the leaders were eventually executed.
Arrest, imprisonment, and execution
In May 1960, Zhang's girlfriend, Tan Chanxue, was arrested while trying to escape to Hong Kong. Zhang tried to free her using a fake public security ID, but was captured. He escaped, but was recaptured not long after. In 1970, he was found to be communicating with Du Yinghua and "engaging in counter-revolutionary activities in prison". Du Yinghua and Zhang ChunYuan were executed side by side in 1970 on the shores of Jiaojia Bay.
The members of the Clique were politically rehabilitated in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, who ironically, was in charge of the Anti-rightist Campaign that saw the students down the road to Counter-revolutionary activism in the first place.

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