Sparks China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future

by Johnson, Ian

• ISBN13: 9780197799352
• ISBN10: 0197799353
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197575529
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-03-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

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.

Author Biography

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent twenty years in China writing for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, as well as serving for five years on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. He is the author of three other books that focus on the intersection of politics and civil society, including The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, and Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China. He is the founder of the China Unofficial Archive and lives in Berlin, Germany.

Table of Contents

Preface

PART I The Past
1. Introduction: The Landscape of Memory
The Hexi Corridor
2. The Ditch
Facing Walls
3. The Sacrifice
Bamboo Strips
4. Spark
Rebirth
5. History as Weapon
How the Red Sun Rose
6. History as Myth
The National Museum

PART II The Present
7. The Limits of Amnesia
The Ma Family Mansion
8. I Know I Know Nothing
Snow's Visit
9. The Gateway
Bloodlines
10. Remembrance
Tie Liu's Cafe
11. Lay Down Your Butcher's Knife!
Videoing China's Villages

PART III The Future
12. Virus
Soft Burial
13. Empire
The Empty Warehouses
14. The Land of Hermits
15. Conclusion: Learning to Walk Underground

Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Suggested Readings