Sources

Weighed by method.

Five markers set the weight. Politics is shown in the open and never counted. Party sources show what the Party said.

M1. Primary documents a reader can check.
M2. States its method and its limits.
M3. Reports evidence against its own thesis.
M4. Published where specialists attack it.
M5. Avoids round unsourced numbers.

Source	Tier	Markers	Weight	Method	Declared position
Yinghong Cheng Delaware State University, USA	2	✓✓✓✓✓	100	Published document collections, Central Committee directives and Politburo minutes including an unpublished February 1951 meeting, regional bureau and provincial reports, and township sample statistics. The Harvard and CUHK Database of Chinese Political Campaigns is open and a reader can check it.	No political position found. Funding disclosed: NEH faculty award 2022, National Humanities Center fellowship. No think tank affiliation.
Jeffrey Javed PhD Harvard, 2017, advisor Elizabeth J. Perry	2	✓✓✓½✓	90	Archival documents, internal Party publications, oral histories, memoirs, and a dataset of 124 local county gazetteers gathered over twelve months of fieldwork in Anhui and Jiangsu. The strongest document base in this register.	None found.
Yang Kuisong 杨奎松 East China Normal University, Shanghai	2	✓×✓✓✓	80	Reads an internal state report, Xu Zirong of Public Security, January 1954, against the centre's own quota. His source apparatus was not read directly; the position is corroborated by three independent sources, none of them him.	Not verified. A mainland-based historian publishing in the PRC and in Western journals, so mainland publishing constraints apply as a structural matter. No sourced statement of censorship of him specifically.
Zhou Xun 周逊 University of Essex, UK. Dikotter's research collaborator	2	✓✓×✓✓	80	Her own archival research in Guizhou and Sichuan, set against the published official totals. Names her archives, which the primary source does not.	Collaborator on the People's Trilogy, which a reader should know when her figures are used to corroborate Dikotter.
Julia C. Strauss SOAS, University of London	2	½✓✓✓×	70	Documentary work on campaign-mode state building. She questions whether a nationwide quota was feasible given regional diversity, which cuts against the quota-centred reading she otherwise shares.	None found.
Zuo Ci 左慈 Freelance writer, not an academic. Published in Twenty-First Century, CUHK	2	✓½×½✓	60	Every figure keyed to a dated internal report, which is why the weight survives his not being an academic. The venue is an edited journal, not peer review.	None found. Not an academic, and that belongs on the page whenever he is cited.
Brian DeMare Tulane University, USA. John Christie Barr Professorship	2	½✓×✓×	50	Archives plus literary and documentary texts read against the grain, including Ding Ling, Zhang Ailing and Hinton's Fanshen, which he argues functions as propaganda. Oral interviews. The figure itself is a synthesis and its supporting documents were not verified.	Writes for Jacobin, the American socialist magazine, and uses it to press the Party on the concealed violence of land reform. A left venue arguing the publication's own point, which is exactly why politics does not set the weight.
Frank Dikotter University of Hong Kong. Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford	2	½××✓×	30	Communist Party archives, per his institution's own description, plus interviews and memoirs. Which archives, at what level, and how many documents, could not be verified from any readable source.	Hoover Institution senior fellowship. Appears on the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation speaker and leader pages: an advocacy organisation, not a research institute, and a material affiliation when weighing his aggregates. No party allegiance stated in his own words.
Frederick C. Teiwes Historian of CCP elite politics, University of Sydney, not verified	2	½××✓×	30	Synthesis of Party documentary sources. Scored from a citation rather than from the text, and the score says so.	None found.
Benedict Stavis Emeritus, Temple University, USA. Contributor, Foreign Policy Research Institute	2	×××½×	10	A death figure in an aside, inside a book about agricultural mechanisation, with no verifiable supporting apparatus.	None stated. FPRI is a Philadelphia think tank.
Jurgen Domes German political scientist, Saarland University, not verified	2	×××½×	10	Not verified. A round number with no derivation that could be checked.	None found.
Xu Zirong and Luo Ruiqing Deputy Minister and Minister of Public Security, PRC	3	·····	0	Party-produced institutional assertion. It establishes what the ministry told itself, on a date, and nothing else.	The state that carried out the campaign, counting it.
Adam Cathcart Associate Professor of East Asian History, University of Leeds	2	·✓·×✓	n/a	On zhenfan, synthesis of Strauss and Yang with a regional frame. No archival casualty work. Cite him on the historiography, never for a number.	None found.
Felix Wemheuer Chair Professor for Modern China Studies, University of Cologne	2	···✓·	n/a	Synthesis around five social hierarchies. His archival work concentrates on the Great Leap famine, not on 1947 to 1953.	Not established. He has edited volumes on Marxism and communist history and trained at the CCP History Institute at Renmin. No statement of allegiance from him was found and none is inferred here from his venues.
Maurice Meisner Harvey Goldberg Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Died 2012	2	·····	n/a	Synthesis and intellectual history, not archival demography.	His colleague Edward Friedman records the charge that his approach seemed to some too kind to the Mao era and too mean-spirited to the Deng era. That charge is reported as circulating and could not be attached to a named critic in a named publication.
Stephen Kotkin Hoover Institution, Stanford. Professor emeritus, Princeton	2	·····	n/a	Not applicable to these quantities. On China he argues comparatively from the Soviet case.	Hoover Institution senior fellow. Frames Marxism-Leninism as anti-capitalism plus anti-imperialism, in his own words.
沈志华 Shen Zhihua Director, Center for Cold War International History Studies, East China Normal University	1	·····	n/a	Bought declassified Russian archives with 1.4 million yuan of his own money in 1995 and published them in 34 volumes. On the Soviet thread this is as checkable as provenance gets.	Publishes under mainland constraints, documented. Runs a government-funded institute and has strong Party lineage. Also reports being blocked from PRC archives. Two sources disagree on how constrained he is and both may be true at different times.