This English translation is roughly two-thirds the length of Tan Hecheng’s monumental Chinese original. In carrying out the editing work (with Mr. Tan’s permission and with invaluable input from cotranslator Guo Jian), I focused on preserving the richness of the original content while paring away extraneous material to improve flow and clarity for non-Chinese readers. This entailed removing duplicative narratives, cutting out names of less significant individuals, excerpting documents rather than reproducing them in full, and summarizing some blocks of text in tables. I also carried out some reordering of the text with the needs of an English readership in mind. I take full responsibility for any infelicities resulting from this process.
The chief objective of the editing was to highlight Tan Hecheng’s exploration of how atrocities such as the Daoxian massacre occur, and his search for the switch that turns ordinary people into bloodthirsty murderers. Tan Hecheng is not the first or last writer to investigate this theme, but his nuanced description of the processes and individuals involved should contribute significantly to our understanding of mass killings, not only in China but also elsewhere in the world.
I would like to thank the Open Society Foundations for essential support of this translation.