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Summary
Using history to challenge Communist Party rule. Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future describes how some of China's best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping's signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party's survival. But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present--powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping's strongman rule. Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting--a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Johnson (The Souls of China) delivers a striking account of people who have defied authority to document negative aspects of life under the Chinese Communist Party. According to Johnson, as each iteration of the party tries to erase the past, each new generation produces its own "underground historians" (a shorthand for "university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists") who are "ready to spring into action when the state's guard is down." For example, he recounts the saga of Spark, a short-lived underground journal published in the northwest city of Tianshi in 1960 by a group of young people exiled to the countryside to do farm work. Before it was shut down, Spark challenged Mao's cult of personality and blamed party mismanagement for the famine and starvation of the Great Leap Forward. After the rise of the internet, online communities brought together more dissident voices. It was online citizen journalists, Johnson notes, who told the world what was going on in Wuhan at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. He highlights the story of Li Wenliang, a young ophthalmologist who was punished by the state for spreading rumors after he warned his colleagues about the new disease. This immersive survey combines interviews, firsthand reportage, and historical research to paint a moving group portrait of China's political dissidents. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
Those looking for horrors in China's recent past have no shortage of examples to choose from: the 1967 massacre of more than 9,000 people by Communist party cadres in Dao County, who threw the bodies of "class enemies" into a river to decompose; the starvation and cannibalismof thousands of prisoners at Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu, in the late 1950s. For many, however, the struggle is being allowed to remember that such events happened at all. Memory is a compelling and slippery topic for students of China. Books such as Tania Branigan's Red Memory have demonstrated how even people who lived through the Cultural Revolution struggle to make sense of what their memories are actually telling them. And the government demands total control over the official narrative: China's leader, Xi Jinping, has warned against "historical nihilism" and believes the collapse of the Soviet Union came about because people were allowed to question, and lose faith in, the party's version of the past. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson tackles this difficult subject via China's "counter-historians" who, through various mediums including documentary, fiction and even woodcuts, feel compelled to create a record of China as they see it. It is deeply satisfying to read a China book that could only have been written after decades of serious engagement with the country Take Ai Xiaoming, a feminist scholar and documentary maker in her 70s, who has spent much of her adult life making films about topics that the authorities would rather people forget, such as the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, where government failings contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. Her biggest project is a five-part epic about Jiabiangou. Ai interviewed Si Jicai, one of the survivors, who recalled eating the remains of his fellow inmates. For her efforts, Ai has been banned from leaving China, but remains undeterred in her film-making. A more poetic title for Johnson's book might have been jianghu, which in Mandarin means "rivers and lakes", but can also refer to the righteous bandits who have historically populated ungovernable parts of the country. For millennia China's lush backwaters were home to rogues and hermits who refused to be governed by the emperor of the day. Johnson's skill lies in demonstrating the philosophical links between China's geography and its political and cultural landscape. Just like the jianghu, the counter-historians are stubbornly ungovernable. They are driven by a sense of morality rather than economic self-interest. In fact, his book takes its title from a tiny magazine that had a short but heroic run in 1960, and is the subject of a film, available on YouTube, by renowned documentary maker Hu Jie. The magazine was published by a small group of students who had grown disillusioned with the failings of the Communist party. They were sentenced to decades in prison and, in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution a few years later, two were executed. Despite their untimely ends, these student publishers had an outsized impact on later generations of historians. Johnson argues that the work of their devotees, including Hu, Ai and thousands of writers, film-makers and artists who question the state, will be difficult to extinguish. Beijing is estimated to spend as much on domestic security as it does on national defence, but still China's underground historians continue to work. It is deeply satisfying to read a book about China that could only have been written after decades of serious engagement with the country. As the veteran China-watcher Perry Link put it recently, Johnson "writes entirely from the indigenous side of the seam". Better yet to consume the works of these Chinese counter-historians directly, and Johnson closes the book with a plea to readers to engage with his subjects, despite the political, geographical and linguistic challenges. After all, as Hu tells Johnson, China's previous historians "weren't afraid to die. They died in secret, and we of succeeding generations don't know what heroes they were ¿ If we don't know this, it is a tragedy."
Kirkus Review
In an authoritarian state, writing about history is a dangerous but necessary undertaking. Milan Kundera once wrote, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This is the idea that informs Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist with a deep and personal connection to China, who chronicles his discussions with a range of writers and filmmakers working to tell the true story of the country's past and present. This is known as minjian lishi, which roughly translates to "grassroots history" or "counter-history." It can be a dangerous undertaking, as successive Chinese administrations have made concerted efforts to propagate an "official" version of events, a narrative that describes the Communist Party as the pinnacle of a historical process. In particular, Xi Jinping has made the control of history a priority as a means to legitimize his authoritarian approach. Historians that do not follow the party line can face imprisonment or might simply disappear. Thankfully, there are many that accept the risks, and Johnson gives them the space to explain why and how they do it. Some have produced documentary films based on interviews with people who were persecuted over political offenses, while others have written books and articles criticizing the government over corruption or its handling of the pandemic. They have told poignant stories dealing with the repression of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities. In other cases, writers have used fiction to examine historical injustices. The internet has provided new avenues to tell stories, and dissidents have been ingenious in finding ways around the government firewalls. There is a continuing demand for their output, but several historians acknowledge the difficulty of challenging the state and see themselves more as providing a record for future generations. This represents the author's fundamental message: Speak the truth before it is forgotten. A brave book about inspiring people, underlining the value of freedom, independence, and courage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
This thought-provoking and thoroughly researched volume by Johnson (Council on Foreign Relations) seeks to reveal how some intellectuals in China have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the state's monopoly on history and how they have engaged in struggles of memory against forgetting. The book's 15 chapters are divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1--6) focuses on the founding years of the Communist Party, a time of intense violence. The second section (chapters 7--11) deals with the efforts in recent years to challenge the Party's domination of history. The third section (chapters 12--15) looks into several events that "indicate the future trends and potential for political change" (p. xii). The author believes that "if the history of this movement [of underground historians] has taught us anything, it is that it has grown with time, despite setbacks. We can look at individual battles and see defeat. But we can also see endless cycle of creation, of new sparks that leap off the flint of history every time it is struck" (p. 305). Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. --Stephen K. Ma, emeritus, California State University, Los Angeles
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix |
| I The Past | |
| 1 Introduction: The Landscape of Memory | 3 |
| Memory: The Hexi Corridor | 15 |
| 2 The Ditch | 17 |
| Memory: Facing Walls | 37 |
| 3 The Sacrifice | 43 |
| Memory: Bamboo Slips | 60 |
| 4 Spark | 65 |
| Memory: Etchings | 93 |
| 5 History as Weapon | 97 |
| Memory: How the Red Sun Rose | 112 |
| 6 History as Myth | 117 |
| Memory: National Museum of China | 128 |
| II The Present | |
| 7 The Limits of Amnesia | 135 |
| Memory: A Landlord's Mansion | 146 |
| 8 The Lost City | 151 |
| Memory: Snow's Visit | 165 |
| 9 The Gateway | 167 |
| Memory: Bloodlines | 184 |
| 10 Remembrance | 189 |
| Memory: Tie Liu's Cafe | 206 |
| 11 Lay Down Your Butcher's Knife | 211 |
| Memory: Videoing China's Village | 228 |
| III The Future | |
| 12 Virus | 235 |
| Memory: Soft Burial | 252 |
| 13 Empire | 257 |
| Memory: The Lost Warehouses | 275 |
| 14 The Land of Hermits | 281 |
| 15 Conclusion: Learning to Walk Underground | 293 |
| Appendix: Exploring China's Underground History | 307 |
| Acknowledgments | 311 |
| Notes | 315 |
| Bibliography | 349 |
| Illustration Credits | 367 |
| Index | 369 |