中国民间档案馆网站全面改版：新功能、新面貌，与您一起展望2026

A New Look and New Features for 2026

中国民间档案馆网站最新升级后的页面

作者：张彦

By Ian Johnson

The English version of this newsletter follows the Chinese version below.

亲爱的读者们：

随着2025年接近尾声，中国民间档案馆团队特此感谢您在过去一年对我们的关注与支持。

在本期简报中，我将简要回顾我们在2025年的工作，并介绍我们网站的最新改版与功能更新。

回顾2025

2025年3月，我们在Substack上推出了您现在正在阅读的每周简报。每一期简报旨在推介馆藏的一本书、一部电影、一份期刊或一篇文章。我们的目标，是向读者阐明民间档案馆网站上的材料不仅具有历史意义，对于我们理解当下的中国也必不可缺。

因为有您这样的读者，我们的简报获得了不错的阅读量——在短短九个月内，我们在Substack上拥有了4800名关注者和订阅者，以及10.6万次浏览。如果您享受阅读这份简报，也请考虑将其推荐给身边的朋友，以便我们能接触到更多读者。

至今已发布的近50期简报，涵盖了理解中国历史和当代社会的关键主题：从对毛泽东时代政治运动的记述，到关于香港社会运动的分析；从中国长期存在的农村问题，到当下对女性主义表达的压制；从1980年代的自由思潮，到近年来当代行动者的故事，包括刘晓波、许志永、彭立发和张展。一些创作者，如著名作家和纪录片导演艾晓明教授，也为我们的简报贡献了原创研究和独家一手记述。

我们这份双语简报的大多数读者是中文使用者，我们的网站也主要以中文阅读为主，中文版网页占有80%的访问量。来自中文世界的这种关注和支持令我们备受鼓舞，因为我们希望，这些简报可以接触到想要了解真实中国历史的中国人和海外华人。

在过去的2025年，我们也显著扩大了馆藏。我们现在收藏了近600本书籍和700期已被禁的期刊。我们还在网站上重点推介了一百多部中国纪录片，每部影片附有详细说明和观看链接。以上所有内容现在都可以在我们的网站上搜索使用。

中国民间档案馆每周简报自2025年3月创办以来，已拥有4800名关注者和订阅者，以及10.6万次浏览。

中国民间档案馆网站最新升级

2025年12月16日，我们正式对网站进行了第二次升级，增加了新的研究工具并优化了使用界面。

当我们于2023年12月13日首次上线时，我们的网站依靠GitHub开发的软件运行，因为我们主要根据主题、作者、格式和时代归类馆藏，用户可依照上述四个类别进行相应检索和阅读。

在2025年3月的第一次升级中，我们的网站迁移到了名为Omeka S的平台——一个由从事展览、档案和文化遗产的机构使用的开源平台，这次升级使我们能够在网站上发布简报，为我们的档案添加了地图功能，包含创作者数据库，甚至举办在线展览。

在此次最新的升级中，我们改进了搜索功能。过去，搜索仅涵盖我们对馆藏的描述。现在，搜索可以连接到书籍、期刊或文章中的所有文本。因此，现在当你搜索一个词条时，所有结果会显示该词条在正文中出现的位置，读者不仅可以通过我们的简介了解该馆藏，还可以直接进入到某特定词条的使用语境。

进入“全部馆藏”页面后，可在顶部搜索栏输入关键词进行搜索。如果点击“更多筛选条件”，你会看到按拼音首字母顺序排列的所有标签和筛选器。这使得搜索“文化大革命”或“白纸运动”等词条变得容易。例如，输入城市名称“天津”到搜索框中，然后按回车键，目前可以得到五个搜索结果，每个结果下方都有一个片段。用户无需打开每一份馆藏档案，即可评估该结果是否有用。

作为网站界面优化的一部分，网页上的图像经过了遮罩和颜色编码处理：

• 紫色代表关于网站的功能：图片库、订阅按钮和探索按钮；

• 黄色代表简报；

• 红色代表电影和视频；

• 蓝色代表期刊；

• 青色代表书籍；

• 绿色代表文章。

当用户将光标悬停在物品上（或用手指点击手机或平板电脑时），颜色遮罩会消失，显示出作品的全彩原貌。

这些新的设计迫使我们暂停了一些网站功能。在接下来的几个月里，我们将恢复地图功能、在线展览以及网站上专门的简报页面。

中国民间档案馆于2024年整理出版向承鉴回忆录：《炼狱归魂：大饥荒年代“星火”案幸存者的回忆》。

展望2026

2026年，我们计划与当地组织者合作，在德国柏林和美国华盛顿特区共同举办电影节。更多详情将在未来几个月公布。

我们还计划出版中国民间档案馆专题新书。2024年，我们整理出版了向承鉴的回忆录，并向世界各地的图书馆捐赠了副本。读者可以在2026年看到类似的历史记录出版与读者见面。

我们将在网站上增加更多部纪录片的介绍，其中许多将附带观看链接。

我们将继续在档案馆中添加新的书籍、期刊、文章、视频收藏，举办在线展览。这份每周简报也将持续下去，继续在新的一年跟您见面。

如果您有任何建议或意见，请发电子邮件至 info@minjian-danganguan.org 与我们联系。

再次感谢您的支持。

敬祝，

新年快乐

更上层楼

此致，

张彦 (Ian Johnson)

中国民间档案馆创办人兼总编辑

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The China Unofficial Archives website after the latest update

A New Look and New Features for 2026

By Ian Johnson

Dear Readers:

As 2025 draws to a close, the China Unofficial Archives team would like to thank you for your time, attention, and support during this busy year.

In this newsletter, I will provide a recap of our work in 2025 and highlight a major new update to our website.

2025 Recap

In March, we launched the weekly newsletter on Substack that you are reading now. In each issue, we aim to feature a book, film, journal, or article from our archive. Our goal is to demonstrate that the materials on our site are not just historical but also highly relevant to our understanding of China today.

Thanks to readers like you, we have enjoyed great readership—4,800 followers and subscribers on Substack and 106,000 views, all in just nine months. If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to a few friends so we can reach even more readers.

In nearly 50 newsletters so far, the contributors to our newsletter have covered a wide range of topics: from accounts of Mao’s political campaigns to social movements in Hong Kong, from China’s longstanding rural issues to the suppression of feminist expression, from the intellectual revival in the 1980s to the stories of modern activists including Liu Xiaobo, Xu Zhiyong, Peng Lifa, and Zhang Zhan. Some authors, such as the prominent writer and filmmaker Prof. Ai Xiaoming, also contributed original research and exclusive firsthand accounts to our newsletter.

Most readers of our bilingual newsletter are Chinese speakers, and many email subscriptions are from Chinese email servers such as QQ and 163. Our site is mainly read in Chinese, with 80 percent of visits on the Chinese webpages. Such attention and support from the Chinese-speaking world hearten us because, if we ever have a target audience, then it would be people inside China or those in the diaspora hoping for a reliable source of materials about their country’s history.

In 2025, we have also expanded our holdings significantly. We now host nearly 600 books and 700 issues of now-banned journals. We are highlighting over a hundred Chinese documentary films on our site with detailed descriptions and external viewing links. All of these contents are now readily searchable on our website.

Since its launch in March 2025, the China Unofficial Archives newsletter has gained 4,800 followers and subscribers on Substack and 106,000 views.

Our Latest Upgrade

On December 16, 2025, we officially upgraded our website for a second time, adding new research tools and a more visually compelling interface.

When we first launched on December 13, 2023, our site was run on software developed on GitHub. Users could sort the books, films, and journals in the archive by theme, author, format, and era because we tagged each item based on those four categories.

In our first upgrade in March 2025, our archive moved to a software platform known as Omeka S, which is an open-source platform used by institutions involved in exhibitions, archives, and cultural heritage. Omeka S allowed us to launch this newsletter on our website, add a mapping function for our archives, include a database of creators, and even host online exhibitions.

In our latest upgrade, we improved our search function. In the past, searches only encompassed our descriptions of the archival items. Now it includes all the text in the book, journal, or article (as long as the text is optimized for OCR, which most of our archival items are). So now, when you search for a term, you get a snippet below the item showing where the term shows up in the text. This allows you to find things more quickly and figure out if the item is what you need.

For example, go to the “Works” page, which shows the full archive. At the top of the page is the search bar. If you click on “more filters” you get all the tags and all the filters alphabetized. That makes it easy to search for a term like “Cultural Revolution” or “White Paper Movement” because now they are alphabetized—in Chinese, they are alphabetized based on the pinyin romanization system.

As an example, type in the Chinese word for the city of Tianjin. For those who can’t type Chinese, cut and paste these two characters “天津” into the search box and hit enter. You will get five hits with a snippet beneath each one. This allows you to evaluate if the hit is useful, without having to open the item.

A search for the keyword “Tianjin”

As part of the upgrade to the aesthetics of the site, images are shaded and color-coded:

• Purple represents features about the site: the picture gallery, the Subscribe button, and the Explore button;

• Yellow represents the newsletter;

• Red represents films and videos;

• Blue represents journals;

• Turquoise represents books;

• Green represents articles.

You will also notice that when you hover the cursor (or put your finger on your phone or tablet) on the item, the color screen goes away and the full-color representation of the work is revealed.

The new design and functionalities forced us to temporarily take down a few things. In the next few months, we will restore the mapping functions, the online exhibitions, and a separate page on the site for the newsletter.

China Unofficial Archives previously published Xiang Chengjian’s memoir, Return From Purgatory, A Memoir of Surviving China’s Great Famine and the “Spark” Case.

Plans for 2026

In 2026, we plan to partner with local organizers and co-host film festivals in Berlin and Washington, DC. More on that in the coming months.

We also plan to publish a new book. In 2024, we published the memoirs of Xiang Chengjian as a physical book, donating copies to research libraries around the world. Readers can expect a similar volume later this year.

We will be adding many more descriptions of Chinese documentary films to our website, many with external links for viewing.

We will keep adding new books, journals, articles, video collections, and even online exhibitions to the archive. This newsletter will also continue.

If you have suggestions or comments, please contact us at info@minjian-danganguan.org.

Thanks again for all your support.

Sincerely,

Ian Johnson

Founder and editor-in-chief