Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Journalist and author Ian Johnson discusses his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, on why and how he came to write his book. Questions are asked by Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York and Glenn Tiffert a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China.
In an in-depth account of his book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, author Ian Johnson explains how China’s rulers have been changing the country’s history to solidify their position. He quotes extensively the current generation of so-called underground historians, who use new technologies to reinstate their views on their history, for a talk at USC China Institute.
History called the communist party to save China, that is the way history is used by the party, says author Ian Johnson in a speech about his newly published book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future in WorldOregon. But the official history doesn’t remain unchallenged. “Ian Johnson explores 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,” says the website.
“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 Ian Johnson recently published Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, and discusses the dominance of women as underground historians with Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. Women are relative outsiders in China’s power structures which puts them in a good position to document the country’s history, he says.
One of the first things Xi Jinping did after being named general secretary of China’s ruling Communist Party was tour an exhibition at the National Museum on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square.
It was called “the Road to Rejuvenation.” News photos showed Xi and other top leaders standing reverently before photos and artifacts that traced the long arc of China’s modern history. The symbolism was hard to miss.
In his new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson says Xi unveiled the concept of the “China Dream” at the museum on that fall day in 2012. “That goal was closer at hand than at any time in recent history, Xi said, because the nation had learned from its history,” Johnson writes.
In the following years, Xi would put on display a dogged obsession with controlling the historical narrative — shuttering independent journals, muzzling outspoken scholars, jailing critics he accused of “historical nihilism,” and re-drawing the boundaries around school curricula.
Yet through it all, a handful of people chronicling China’s “grassroots history” has been fighting back. Johnson calls it a movement, and his book tells their stories.
They are people like the filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, who made a documentary about an all but forgotten forced labor camp in the desert. And the journalist Jiang Xue, who has protected the history of an underground journal from the late 1950s that attempted to record the privations, and desperation, experienced during the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward.
Ian Johnson discusses at the Council on Foreign Relations his new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, which 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.
In his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, the Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes a movement of underground historians, trying to safeguard the country’s history from eradication by the communist party, in a discussion at Politico.
Politico:
What is the most important takeaway from this book?
The conventional wisdom about China is that the Communist Party has won. Dissent is crushed. The surveillance state rules. This book shows that this view is too simplistic. These are dark times but there are still people actively challenging the party by documenting its biggest failings, from famines of the past to its Covid policies of the present. These people make underground documentary films and videos, or produce samizdat magazines and books. They have not been crushed.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while compiling this book?
I thought that history would mainly matter to older Chinese people. But young people face soaring unemployment and a bleak social landscape. Some talk of dropping out or trying to emigrate. But as we saw in last year’s “white paper” protests, many others can become much more active. And they do so by drawing on the works of the public intellectuals that I profile.
How might a more accurate rendering of Chinese contemporary history by “underground historians” – rather than the CCP-sanitized version – impact Chinese public perceptions and attitudes toward the U.S?
The U.S is portrayed in the Chinese media as the country’s bogeyman. Many people swallow this nationalistic line, but China’s growing economic problems and social stagnation are causing many others to look for more credible explanations. The underground historians document how China’s problems are homegrown. If these ideas spread – and I think they will, as the economy enters a period of stasis, in part because of demographic problems and a rigid political system – then more people will see that it is not the U.S that is at fault for China’s problems. Instead, they may realize that it is the Communist Party’s policies that have led China away from growth and stability. But this is a long-term process. China isn’t facing an imminent upheaval. Instead, we’re seeing something akin to what happened in the 1960’s and 1970s in Eastern Europe, when the regimes there seemed unbeatable, but were developing grave problems that home-grown critics began to document.
China veteran and scholar Ian Johnson will publish in September 2023 his next book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. “It 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,” writes Ian Johnson at his weblog.
Ian Johnson:
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.
The book concludes with an essay by Ian Johnson: indisputably one of the most insightful commentators on modern China, along with this volume’s editor. His chapter encourages the reader to step back from the consideration of China’s historical narrative, and to instead observe the country’s own attitude to its heritage. Johnson is, it is fair to say, uncomfortable with the nature of this relationship: “[A] country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past–can it be trusted?” he asks. “What eats at a country, or a people, or a civilisation, so much that remains profoundly uncomfortable with its history?”
Johnson’s essay is worth the price of admission alone, but even without its inclusion, this volume (despite its slightly unwieldy coffee-table design) would remain my recommendation as the best place to start for those who wish to get a handle on modern China.
China has a longstanding tradition of rewriting and even recreating its own past. The current regime is not different, writes journalist Ian Johnson in the Guardian and he meticulously analyses the complicated relationship between the Communist Party and its history.
Ian Johnson:
It is hard to overstate history’s role in a Chinese society run by a communist party. Communism itself is based on historical determinism: one of Marx’s points was that the world was moving inexorably towards communism, an argument that regime-builders such as Lenin and Mao used to justify their violent rises to power. In China, Marxism is layered on top of much older ideas about the role of history. Each succeeding dynasty wrote its predecessor’s history, and the dominant political ideology – what is now generically called Confucianism – was based on the concept that ideals for ruling were to be found in the past, with the virtuous ruler emulating them. Performance mattered, but mainly as proof of history’s judgment.
That means history is best kept on a tight leash. Shortly after taking power in 2012 as chairman of the Communist party, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping re-emphasised this point in a major speech on history published in People’s Daily, the official party newspaper. Xi is the son of a top party official who helped found the regime, but who fell out with Mao, and suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Some thought that Xi might take a more critical view towards the Mao era, but in his speech, he said that the 30 years of reform that began under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, should not be used to “negate” the first 30 years of communist rule under Mao.
I mentioned the plan already earlier in the week, but the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club is going to organize a small viewing of a very solid Dutch documentary on Ma Lin or Henk Sneevliet, the Dutch guy you can see at the little museum at Xintiandi on the establishment of the Communist Party in China. If you are interested in China's history in the 1920's and think you can stand a 90 minutes simultanously translation from Dutch into English, let me know. There will be limited seating, but those who reply now will get a preferential treatment. The viewing is most likely going to take place the week after the May holiday. (And if you know somebody who can translated Dutch into English, do let me also know.)
