Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

Ian Johnson

Sep. 2023 · Allen Lane · Voorgelees deur Ian Johnson

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In China today a nationwide movement emerges, defying crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.

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 justify its rule.

But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists and film-makers have challenged 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 pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present.

Based on years of 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-twenty-first century.

©2023 Ian Johnson (P)2023 Penguin Audio

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Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent most of his adult life in China, working as a correspondent for The New York Times, New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of other books that also 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.