Red Crag

Red Crag or Red Rock (Chinese: 红岩; pinyin: Hóngyán) was a 1961 novel based partly on fact by Chinese authors Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, who were former inmates in a Kuomintang prison in Sichuan. It was set in Chongqing during the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and featured underground communist agents under the command of Zhou Enlai fighting an espionage battle against the Kuomintang. The main protagonist Jiang Xueqin, or "Sister Jiang" (Chinese: 江姐; pinyin: Jiāng Jiě), is based on the Communist revolutionary Jiang Zhuyun (1920–1949). The novel contains a major scene in which Sister Jiang and fellow prisoners learn embroider the national flag together upon learning of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The novel contained a highly negative portrayal for the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, as responsible for the running prisons jailing communists and other political dissidents, although in reality they were actually run by the KMT secret police service BIS, and had no American involvement. Xujun Eberlein wrote in The Atlantic that "The novel played a critical role in the heroism culture of the Mao era." The book includes a poem that was attributed to, but was not written by, the revolutionary "martyr" Chen Ran (陈然, 1923－1949).