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During the Cold War, authors from Eastern Europe and Russia belonged to household names among Western elites, but today translations of their Chinese counterparts failed to make it to Western bookshelves, says Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. One of the reasons is the changed commercial business models of publishing houses, he says in an extensive interview in China Law & Policies.
China Law & Policies:
Johnson: Yes, I do mention in the introduction, and then especially in the conclusion, I say, rather than seeing them as uniquely Chinese, we should see them as part of a global conversation about how we deal with the past. And that rather than seeing people like Fang Fang as a one-off author in this far away land–“planet China”–that has these weird things going on, we should see her as part of our cultural heritage. She uses techniques of historical-based fiction used by U.S. superstar academic writers like Saidiya Hartman at Columbia University. She uses fiction to recreate the enslaved person’s experiences because we don’t obviously have memoirs and diaries of enslaved people. So she does all the research possible, and then she uses a bit of imagination to put herself in that person’s place and writes about what it might’ve been like to come over on a slave ship.
This is in the conclusion, I issue a plea for civil society in the West to try to bring these people more into our conversations. We don’t translate their works enough. Thank goodness that Fang Fang’s novels are now being translated a little bit. But when I think back to the Cold War, people like Václav Havel and Milos Forman and Milan Kundera were kind of household names among educated people in the West in a way that their Chinese counterparts today are not. We need to find a way to get these works published, get the movies out there, have a festival for some of the films. And that’s why I hope it can become part of our world and not just some weird thing off in China.
CL&P: Yeah. And why do you think it’s not part of our world? Is it a language or cultural issue, right? You talked about the Cold War, there were more translations going on. Is it a lack of funding? I mean, why do you think it’s not being brought into the Western canon as much?
Johnson: There’s a bunch of reasons, and I’ll mention a few, in no particular order. But I think one, for example, is publishing. I remember in the 1980s, Philip Roth wrote a series of introductions for Central European authors, and they were published by a mainstream publisher [Penguin]. But publishers today are under much more commercial pressure, so that if you’re an editor, you can’t just say, “hey, you know what? I’m just going to publish this stuff because I know it’s not going to make any money, but I feel that this is an important thing. I am going to commission the translation, and we may lose money, but we’re going to make a ton of money elsewhere.” And now when you go to Amazon, you see hardcover books that list for $25 being sold for $19. That $5 is a big chunk of the profit margin of the publishers. So they have to look really carefully at what they publish. This is part of the digitization and the way you can compartmentalize financial returns on things that affect the media in general, newspapers and so on. So there’s that reason.
But also China for many people feels further away. Central Europe was part of the West, so to speak, or you could see them as part of the West, especially Czechoslovakia and Poland and even Russia. Solzhenitsyn wrote in a format–the Russian novel–that was familiar to educated people in the West.
Language is [also] a problem. When they do get overseas, if you were to invite some people over, they don’t speak English. By and large, almost none of the people I write about in the book speak English. People like Ai Weiwei is the total outlier. That’s why he gets so much media attention, because he can speak great English. For example I was trying to get a prominent Chinese journalist a fellowship at a major university here in the West, and they said, well, ‘how’s she going to participate in the fellowship if she can’t speak English very well?’
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.
A poet named Lin Zhao, who contributed to Spark, was the subject of Hu’s 2004 film Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul. When Lin wasn’t handcuffed to chairs and beaten by guards, she wrote poems and essays on scraps of paper by piercing her finger with a hairpin and using her blood as ink. When she ran out of paper, she wrote on her clothing.
With her blood, Lin drew images on prison walls of an incense burner and flowers. From 9:30 to noon each Sunday, she held what she called grand church worship, singing hymns and saying prayers that she learned in her Methodist girls’ school. The prison guards put a tight-fitting hood on Lin that made it difficult for her to breathe and impossible for her to speak.
Lin was executed on April 29, 1968. On May 1, a Communist Party official visited Lin’s mother to demand that she pay a fee for the bullet used to kill her daughter.
Prison guards meticulously saved Lin’s writings to document her counter-revolutionary spirit. After Mao’s death, Lin’s files were declassified and sent to her family.
In Sparks, Ian Johnson tells the stories of people such as Lin Zhao and Hu Jie—Chinese journalists and filmmakers who explore the darkest episodes of Chinese communism, often at great risk to themselves. In Sparks, we meet Ai Xiaoming, who interviewed dozens of survivors of the Jiabiangou forced labor camp and their families to make her seven-hour documentary film, Jiabiangou Elegy (夹边沟祭事). We also meet Journalist Tan Hecheng, who uncovered the story of a 1967 Communist Party–led massacre of nine thousand innocent men, women, and children in Hunan Province. Tan devoted forty years of his life to researching the story of the systematic murders, finally publishing the book The Killing Wind in 2010. “Documenting this wasn’t quixotic,” Johnson writes. “It was a hard-nosed calculation that it would pay off—not for Tan personally but for his country.”
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.
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.
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.
A raving review of the appearance of Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus, a novel, on prostitution in China, at the Jaipur Literary Festival in London, at The Citizen. "I was very fascinated by prostitutes. However, the only prostitution I have done was intellectual prostitution,” Zhang Lijia says.
The Citizen:
A Chinese author has emerged as one of the sensations of the Jaipur Literary Festival underway in London where writers and their admirers have been mingling in the open air.
Nanjing-born Lijia Zhang, who was employed in a Chinese rocket factory in her younger years, is the author of ‘Socialism is Great’, ‘China Remembers’ and ‘Lotus’, said “Writing in English freed me because in China there is censorship and writing in English meant I did not have to go through censorship.”
Zhang was appearing on a panel headlined ‘Words Are All We Have’, alongside Indian writer Anjali Joseph and Sri Lankan novelist Rohan Gunesekera. In her presentation Zhang revealed how she discovered that her grandmother had first been a prostitute and later evolving into her grandfather’s concubine in 1948.
“I was no rocket scientist, I was just a factory worker”, Zhang said about her own life.. “But I was very fascinated by prostitutes. However the only prostitution I have done was intellectual prostitution.”
London-based author Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus, a novel, on prostitution in China, recalls at Varsity the crude reality women have to face in China's economy, a story many outside China might not see, speaking at Cambridge PEN, about the process of writing her latest book.
Varsity:
“I want to show the crude reality of the Chinese market economy and the resilience of women struggling in the bottom of society,” Zhang adds.
Like the characters in Lotus, Zhang has experienced what life is like in a rapidly changing China, having spent a decade working at a factory that produced intercontinental missiles. Although Zhang had dreamed of becoming a journalist and writer from a young age, she was taken out of school to work at a factory at the age of sixteen. Whilst working at the factory, Zhang taught herself English.
“Reading gave me escape and enlightenment, and it gave me a route to escape the tough reality [of the factory] and to broaden my horizons”, she says.
Upon completing a Master’s degree in Creative and Life Writing in London, Zhang returned to China and her dreams took flight as she began to write. She wrote a memoir about her time at the factory, titled “Socialism is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of New China. With Lotus being Zhang’s first fictional novel, she mentions how the transition from fiction to nonfiction writing styles was “extremely challenging”.
“The freedom to create a fictional world was both exciting and intimidating.” Freedom also takes on another meaning in the context of contemporary China when it comes to censorship. A previous book she wrote in Chinese about the Western image of Chairman Mao was censored, Zhang decided to write in English in order to “freely express” herself.
This helped Zhang overcome another type of censorship that was not political, but rather “a writer’s own self-censorship”, as she calls it.
“By writing in English, I gained unexpected literary freedom. By not being inhibited by my mother tongue, I can also be bold as I experiment with the language. I use different words and I structure my sentences differently, consciously and unconsciously. Of course, my experiment doesn’t always work. But I enjoy the adventure.”
Although having studied English for thirty years, Zhang says she still faces great challenges when writing in English, “I write too slowly, and I don’t understand the subtle meanings of certain words, so in that sense, I still regard myself as being a novice.”
Throughout her journey, Zhang draws upon many literary inspirations. She cites George Orwell’s four reasons for writing: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose, as key drivers of her motivation to write. In particular, she remains drawn to Jane Eyre, “a plain-looking character full of spirit and longing”, Zhang comments. In more recent years, she mentions how reading her MA professor Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father shaped the techniques she had used to complete her own memoir.
Following the success of Lotus, Zhang is now turning her focus back towards non-fiction. She is working on a narrative non-fiction book about the children of migrant workers in China, also known as their ‘left-behind’ children. “There are currently 61 million children living in villages across the country without both or one parent,” she says. The book will focus on a rural community in Southwest China’s Guizhou province, to examine the human cost of China’s economic miracle. As preparation, “I am reading or re-reading outstanding literary non-fiction books on China, such as Wish Lantern by Alec Ash and Factory Girls by Leslie Chang.”
As for aspiring writers, Zhang’s words of advice is to just “read and write and live your life.”
“Just going ahead and writing is the best thing you can do,” she says with a smile.
Author Zhang Lijia of Lotus, a novel on prostitution in today's China talks ahead of her lecture at Spittoon Book Club talk January 19 at Timesdirect.tv in Beijing. (Follow the links for more details)
Timesdirect:
It seems that in your book, prostitution is portrayed as a legitimate choice when rampant capitalism condemns a young woman to a life without any thrill or space for individual expression.
I certainly wouldn’t use the word “legitimate.” Rather, for some of the most vulnerable women, it is one of the few or only choices they have – to sell their own bodies. For girls serving the upscale market, it is sometimes a lifestyle choice, a way to obtain quick money. For clients, yes, some visit prostitutes seeking thrill, among other reasons.
At some point in the book Lotus, the protagonist, finds pleasure with one of her clients, one pleasure that she never felt before. The stigma of prostitution is one thing, but the stigma of women’s sexuality is also another subject that you touch upon.
I’d like to portray women as three-dimensional human beings with sexual desires. I found it quite interesting that some women experienced sexual pleasure that they never experienced with their husbands. Some felt bad about it as they regarded their work as “dirty” and it felt wrong to get pleasure out of this disgraceful job. This is one of the reasons that Lotus turns to Buddha – to cleanse herself.
Lotus finds a very understanding and open-minded man in the character of the photographer Bing but their relationship is still complicated. What was the meaning behind Bing’s character?
The photographer Bing is obsessed with photographing the girls. Apart from his noble reasons, there are also selfish reasons.
It is a complicated relationship because they come from such different backgrounds and have different expectations. By introducing the character Bin, a better educated urban man, I was able to discuss some broad social issues.
In the end, we learn that Lotus’ happiness is not going to be dependent on her relationship with a man.
Yes, for me, it is a novel about a young woman finding herself.
Journalist Zhang Lijia, author ofLotus: A Novel on prostitution in China, explains how learning English learned her how to free herself from the constraints of the past when she worked at a factory worker in Nanjing.
Happiness glistened on our front door. Printed in gold on red shiny paper, the large character ‘fu’, meaning happiness or good fortune, shows a person knelt before an altar, prying for happiness. The character was stuck upside down, fu dao, in word-playing tradition to ensure that fu would arrive – dao – at our home. Behind the door, our whole family, dressed in our best outfits, gathered for the annual reunion dinner. Mine was a new cover, made of floral patterned cotton, for my padded Chinese jacket, and a pair of leather shoes instead of padded cotton slippers.
In keeping with tradition, Nai first brought in a fish cooked in soy sauce and announced: “We have fish every year,” then put it aside for later consumption. In Chinese, yu, or fish, sounds like the character for surplus or abundance. In such wordplay lie hopes for a prosperous year ahead.
At Ma’s insistence, Nai sat opposite the door, in the seat reserved for the most honourable person. Ordinarily she didn’t even sit at the table but ate her tiny portion in the kitchen, like a servant. Ma then stood up, raising a little porcelain cup with teardrops engraved around the edge. “A lot has happened this year. I retired, Little Li took over my job and I am trying to get another one.”
“Yes, go for the Confucius Temple job,” cut in my father who had rushed back for the festival. “Deng Xiaoping said, ‘whether white or black, a cat is a good cat so long as it catches the rat.’ I say a job is a good job so long as it pays.” Pleased with his remarks, he voiced them loud enough for the whole building to hear.
Ignoring her husband, Ma continued her speech. “‘Sesame stalks put forth flowers notch by notch’. I wish our lives will get better and better. Cheers!”
Our cups and glasses clinked in the air. I drank tea since I was allergic to alcohol while everyone else downed a type of white liquor, the firewater that soon turned their faces red. Even my brother Xiaoshi was helping himself. He was tall for his age, but painfully skinny, as if forgetting to grow horizontally. Some of his naughty friends were already whistling for him outside our window. It was Nai who made him sit down and eat.
“Eat, eat, I have loads more,” Nai urged, with an ear-to-ear smile that revealed her deep dimples.
With plenty of materials to work with, Nai and Ma had cooked the best New Year banquet for years: chicken soup; sweet and sour fish shaped like a squirrel; a ‘lucky reunion’ stew in a clay pot; stir-fired green vegetables; and Nai’s specialty, the ‘lion’s head’ – a dish of minced meatballs. Food is always the thread that binds Chinese families close together. As our appetites rose with the steam, our chopsticks seized their targets with speed and precision. Spring Festival was the only time we could enjoy food without limit.
Shaun Rein's long-awaited new book The War for China's Wallet: Profiting from the New World Orderis now available at Amazon and possible a bookstore near you. "This book covers more geopolitics than my previous two books and looks at how China is cementing its power through economic carrots/ initiatives like One Belt One Road and by punishing countries like Norway and companies like Lotte that do not follow its wants politically. The book looks at how China is dealing with Southeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, and how the US needs to respond," he writes at the publisher's website.
Shaun Rein:
There is still a lot of money to be made from China's rise, but the profits come at a cost as governments and companies must adhere to the wants of China's government. These are turbulent times politically, and I wrote this book to help governments and companies understand how to navigate China's rising political ambitions. Many argue a war between the US and China is inevitable -- I disagree with this notion, but better understanding is key as are building economic ties.
With Chinese-led initiatives such as One Belt One Road (OBOR) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) combined with uncertainty due to US shifts in policy and apparent commitments over the past decade, the stakes are high for companies looking to profit from the world's newest superpower.
Post-financial crisis, China has emerged as the largest or second largest trading partner for most countries. It has become the second largest market for Fortune 500 companies like Starbucks, Apple, and Nike and drives growth for Hollywood and commodity products. Yet the profits come at a price for countries and companies alike, they must adhere to the political goals of Beijing or else face economic punishment or outright banishment. Using primary research from interviews with hundreds of business executives and government officials, The War for China's Wallet will help companies understand how to profit from China's outbound economic plans as well as a shifting consumer base that is increasingly nationalistic. The countries and companies that get it right will benefit from China's wallet but those that do not will lose out on the world's largest growth engine for the next two decades.
You’re probably best known as the author of ‘The End of Cheap China’. What are the effects of the end of cheap labour pool and how do you think we’re seeing them being played out?
When it came out I was heavily criticized. People said that China was a cheap place and would always be, and I’ve been proven 100% right. Five years later salaries are still going up 10-15% a year, it’s only about 20% cheaper to manufacture in China than in the United States. People need to understand that China is no longer cheap for labour and that’s not going to change. Secondly, rents are soaring. So the only time you want to manufacture in China right now is if you’re trying to sell into the Chinese market or if you’re going into high-end value-added manufacturing, because it’s still cheaper to do high-end consumer electronics here than in the United States.
There are some things companies are doing to handle this. They’re moving west, into Sichuan or Chongqing. They’re expanding operations in the United States. And they’re working on worker efficiency and automation. Automation grew about 58% last year, there’s a lot of investment in robots and China is really leading the way in manufacturing innovation.
Your second book ‘The End of Copycat China’ was published in 2014. Your thesis was that Chinese companies did not innovate technologically because they didn’t have to but now they’re doing so. We’ve seen a huge wave of M&As – is that in pursuit of technology?
It’s hard for lots of Chinese companies to develop technology internally so they either buy technology from overseas or they buy the companies. Germany actually exports more to China than China exports to Germany. There is some technology innovation that’s taking place organically with companies like Alibaba and Tencent. But there’s definitely innovation in China. There has to be, because if companies don’t focus on innovation, they’re not going to be able to earn profits. Even SOEs understand this. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a keynote as the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC). They brought me in to give a keynote to 200 leading cadres from SOEs to talk about how innovation is changing China and how they have to reform and recruit the right talent in order to keep innovating. Even the SOEs understand this.
The question is does the senior government get it? And because of the way SOEs are set up, where they are very risk-averse, how do you create the right incentives for SOEs and their executives to focus on innovation? If you are in an SOE, if you innovate but you lose a lot of money, you’re not going to get promoted. And if you lose your job you’ll probably never get a good job in an SOE. So they have to change the culture. And that’s what SASAC understands and why they brought me in to talk to the cadres. The private sector really gets it. They’re making tons of money and they understand that the SOEs are dinosaurs. If Bank of China was halfway decent, there’s no way anyone would have made AliPay.
China’s story just happens to be intimidatingly vast and complex, which partly explains French’s decision to filter its history through a central concept: tianxia, an ancient Chinese cultural concept that gives his book its title. The literal translation of the word is “everything under heaven”.
What tianxia means in practical political terms, French writes in the book, is “China’s tribute system”.
“Tianxia emerges as a paradigm for China’s geopolitics from a correct sense that it is vastly larger and, for most of its history, vastly richer than any neighbouring state,” French explains during our conversation. “Out of this flows an ideal, from the Chinese perspective, that order can best be established in our neighbourhood by a situation whereby the neighbours defer to us.”
In the most technical sense, deference is expressed through a highly ritualised series of ceremonies: embassies dispatched to pay obeisance to the emperor; the adoption of the Chinese calendar and language. In broader policy terms, tianxia combines carefully deployed “sticks” and “carrots”. French points to historical evidence to argue that China uses inducements first and force only as a last resort: the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 is an example. Carrots include access to Chinese trade, to its potentially vast market, and to what French describes as “patents of authority. China essentially legitimates local leaders by endorsing them”. On this basis, “a harmonious pattern of coexistence can endure in the region. One could say only on this basis”.
Although the current leadership is careful not to invoke tianxia explicitly, French argues that it explains much of China’s international diplomacy. Everything Under the Heavens devotes considerable space to unpicking Beijing’s forthright claims to territory in the South China Sea, which have made several nations uneasy. In 2013, the Philippines took China to an arbitration tribunal in the Hague to invalidate Beijing’s territorial claims. At the heart of the South China Sea dispute is the “nine-dash line”, under which China lays claim to 90 per cent of the area. On July 12 last year, the tribunal ruled in favour of the Philippines.
“China didn’t say, ‘You are infringing upon tianxia’, but that’s very much what was going on,” French says. “[China says] ‘We control those waters. You should get with the programme and defer to us.’”
China has moved from zero tolerance of worship to more than 350 million believers in Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam. In an era in which religion was expected by many to become extinct, this is a stunning development. It has happened in a country where the policies of the regime range from grudging tolerance to heavy-handed oppression. We need to understand the explosion of religious faith in China. Ian Johnson’s excellent book explains it.
He depicts a nation in deep moral crisis, quoting a 2014 official opinion poll in which 88 per cent of respondents agreed that society was suffering from ‘a social disease of moral decay and lack of trust’; and he cites a bestselling novelist who writes of ‘a tide of lust and greed’ surging from every corner of his home city, Chengdu. A Communist Party communiqué laments that ‘in a number of areas, morals are defeated, sincerity is lacking’.
Referring to the party’s promotion of moral exemplars, a blogger tells Johnson: ‘Everything they teach you is fake.’ A Christian publisher says: ‘People can’t believe how corrupt society has become.’ In a society once ruled more by ethics than laws, in which religion and community cohesion were inseparable, people regret ‘the absence of a moral compass’.
In this crisis, Johnson shows that people are turning to religions in search of moral clarity, truth and a meaning to their lives. At a spiritual level, like believers everywhere, they have an impulse to believe in God. At a social level, especially in Christian ‘house churches’, unregulated by the state, and self-governing, they find mutual trust and shared values, communities which combine faith and action. An estimated quarter of the lawyers active in the ‘rights defence’ movement of the early 21st century were Christians.
Book reviews of Sparks:
