Disclosed.

We choose our sources and we do not score them. For each one you see who they are, what the work rests on, who employs and funds them, and the published criticism, so you can judge. Party documents are marked as what the Party said.

Source	Kind	What the work rests on	Affiliations and stated position	Proof
Adam Cathcart Associate Professor of East Asian History, University of Leeds	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Archived copy ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Benedict Stavis Emeritus, Temple University, USA. Contributor, Foreign Policy Research Institute	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Brian DeMare Tulane University, USA. John Christie Barr Professorship	Historian or institution	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.	Has written for Jacobin, the American socialist magazine, where he presses the Party on the concealed violence of land reform.	Open ↗ Archived copy ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Washington, DC	Historian or institution	Signed analyses by named specialists, dated.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
China Leadership Monitor Hoover Institution journal on Chinese elite politics	Historian or institution	Signed, footnoted articles on leadership politics.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
Congressional Research Service (CRS) Library of Congress, US Congress	Historian or institution	Non-partisan reports for Congress by named analysts, versioned and dated.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) US Congress and executive branch commission	Historian or institution	Annual report built from cited Chinese laws, court records and reporting.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
Felix Wemheuer Chair Professor for Modern China Studies, University of Cologne	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Frank Dikotter University of Hong Kong. Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford	Historian or institution	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.	Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford. Listed as a speaker and in leadership pages of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an advocacy organisation. No party allegiance stated in his own words.	Open ↗ Archived copy ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Frederick C. Teiwes Historian of CCP elite politics, University of Sydney, not verified	Historian or institution	Synthesis of Party documentary sources. Scored from a citation rather than from the text, and the score says so.	None found.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Jeffrey Javed PhD Harvard, 2017, advisor Elizabeth J. Perry	Historian or institution	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.	The 2017 Harvard dissertation is listed on Harvard DASH but the file could not be opened to confirm it. The book it became, Righteous Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 2022), is a different text and is not linked in its place.
Julia C. Strauss SOAS, University of London	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Jurgen Domes German political scientist, Saarland University, not verified	Historian or institution	Not verified. A round number with no derivation that could be checked.	None found.	Out of print (C. Hurst, 1980). No publisher, library or archive page for the book was found; only reviews of it exist online.
Maurice Meisner Harvey Goldberg Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Died 2012	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
MERICS Mercator Institute for China Studies, Berlin	Historian or institution	Signed analyses by named specialists, dated.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
Stephen Kotkin Hoover Institution, Stanford. Professor emeritus, Princeton	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva	Historian or institution	Public statements on named laws and cases, dated.	Not yet assessed.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-05
Xu Zirong and Luo Ruiqing Deputy Minister and Minister of Public Security, PRC	Party document	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.	An internal Party report, never published. It is known through historians who quote it, chiefly Yang Kuisong, whose article is linked on his own row.
Yang Kuisong 杨奎松 East China Normal University, Shanghai	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Yinghong Cheng Delaware State University, USA	Historian or institution	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Zhou Xun 周逊 University of Essex, UK. Dikotter's research collaborator	Historian or institution	Her own archival research in Guizhou and Sichuan, set against the published official totals. Names her archives, which the primary source does not.	Collaborated with Frank Dikotter on the research behind the People's Trilogy, so her figures are not independent of his.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
Zuo Ci 左慈 Freelance writer, not an academic. Published in Twenty-First Century, CUHK	Historian or institution	Every figure keyed to a dated internal report. The venue is an edited journal, not peer reviewed.	None found. Not an academic, and that belongs on the page whenever he is cited.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04
沈志华 Shen Zhihua Director, Center for Cold War International History Studies, East China Normal University	Archive editor	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.	Open ↗ Link checked 2026-10-04