2018 will mark the 70th anniversary of the siege of Changchun, perhaps the greatest atrocity of the Chinese civil war. After Communist troops led by Lin Biao failed in their initial attempt to capture the city, on May 30, 1948, Lin decided to mount a blockade, cutting Changchun off from food and fuel shipments.

The goal was to weaken the Nationalist troops by starving them, and cause enough suffering that the civilian population would stop supporting the troops. The strategy was successful, as the Nationalist forces ultimately surrendered to the Communists in October. But by the time the siege ended, probably around 150,000 people, mostly civilians, had starved to death, and roughly the same number of refugees had fled the city.

The event is still little known within China and probably even less so outside it, though in recent years more English-language accounts have become available. Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times wrote an excellent article in 2009, using Chinese published sources and his own interviews with elderly survivors, which is still probably the best short introduction. The article’s observations about the fraught nature of historical memory in China are still very relevant: public commemoration of this anniversary is highly unlikely.

The Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikötter also devoted the opening chapter of his 2013 book The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 to the siege. In just six pages, Dikötter defly uses Chinese archival sources to convey the suffering of the people of Changchun. The event serves as a kind of synecdoche for all the violence perpetrated by the Communist Party against its real and imagined enemies, one of the chief themes of his polemical book.

A longer, more detailed and less polemical account of the siege is in Harold M. Tanner’s 2015 book Where Chiang Kai-shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948. The book is primarily a military history and so it does an excellent job of putting the siege in the context of the civil war and explaining the decision-making on both sides. For instance, he makes it clear that siege tactics were unusual for the Communists, and that the political leadership including Mao was initially skeptical of Lin’s plan (though they ultimately supported it). But Tanner also does not shy away from the human cost and the tricky historical politics of the siege.

Both books rely heavily on White Snow, Red Blood (雪白血红) a 1989 book by PLA colonel Zhang Zhenglong whose revelations about the siege caused a sensation on its original publication. In a comparison that would become famous, Zhang likened the siege to the bombing of Hiroshima: “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”

Zhang’s book was banned on the mainland, though it was reprinted in Hong Kong. Tanner also cites a 1997 book by the historian Liu Tong, The True Record of the War of Liberation in the Northeast (东北解放战争纪实) which he says comes to similar conclusions about the casualties as Zhang’s. It’s not clear if that book has been banned, though it does not seem to be in print in China any longer; Liu has also published several other books on the civil war in the northeast.

Another source on the siege that has recently become available in English, which I have not read, is a firsthand account by survivor Homare Endo, Japanese Girl at the Siege of Changchun. She was seven years old at the time of the siege. Her Japanese manuscript was first published in 1984, and Endo apparently also wrote a Chinese version, according to this interview.

While there is a long list of topics in Chinese history that deserve fuller treatment in English, it seems to me that the siege of Changchun is a deep, complex, and emotional subject very much crying out for a book of its own.