[1] In January 2007, Wu Shulin, the deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publications, had read out a list of books that "violated regulations."

"[2] Having grown up in a family of intellectuals quintessential to the experience of the early years of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhang had first-hand access to the political and culture figures of the 1950s and 1960s.

Her memoir-style work of the early 2000s—which differed considerably from the state-sanctioned, cathartic "scar literature' of the 1970s and 1980s—was groundbreaking is providing an objective expose of the "unimaginable cruelty and atrocity of political movements and the actions of the authorities who created the environment for the Red Guards and the Gang of Four to commit their crimes.

[3] In The Past is Not Like Smoke, for instance, Zhang tells the life stories of eight intellectuals and officials who became friends, and explains how they suffered in the Party's political campaigns.

Those narrated include key players in the early establishment of the People's Republic, including Shi Liang, the minister of justice and deputy chairman of the standing committee of the National People's Congress; Chu Anping, editor-in-chief of the Guangming Daily; Pan Su and husband Zhang Boju (not to be confused with Zhang Yihe's father Zhang Bojun), a scholar and director of the Beijing Zhongshan Calligraphy and Painting Society; Luo Yufeng, the daughter of the late-Qing reformist intellectual Kang Youwei, Nie Gannu, a renowned writer and member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; and Luo Longji, the minister of forestry and a member of the standing committee of the CPPCC.