Overview

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.

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9780197575505

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Reviews

"""A brave book about inspiring people, underlining the value of freedom, independence, and courage."" -- Kirkus Reviews"

"""Johnson vividly describes the work of independent documentary filmmakers, independent journalists, amateur historians, novelists, and memoirists who obsessively pursue the forbidden truths of totalitarian misrule in China."" -- Foreign Affairs ""A brave book about inspiring people, underlining the value of freedom, independence, and courage."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read, Ian Johnson's Sparks is alive with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably, refuse to let their histories be forgotten. It's a privilege to read books like these."" -- Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers ""For decades, Ian Johnson has conducted some of the most important grassroots research of any foreign journalist in China. With Sparks, he turns his attention to history--not the sanctioned, censored, and selective history promoted by the Communist Party, but the independent histories that are being written and filmed by brave individuals across the country. A powerful reminder of how China's future depends on who controls the past."" -- Peter Hessler, National Book Award-winning author, and New Yorker writer ""Sparks tells the stories of underground historians who are determined to write down China's hidden histories of famines, massacres, and virus outbreaks. These stories show why Xi Jinping wants to control history--because memories like these are sparks of light in a heavy darkness."" -- Li Yuan, New York Times columnist ""A powerful narrative of how the human spirit has survived the cruel repression of Maoist totalitarianism and is still doing the same against Xi Jinping's efforts to impose a new form of digital totalitarianism. A must read for anyone interested in the Chinese and China."" -- Steve Tsang, University of London ""In the long years of Chinese people's pursuit of justice and equality, preserving historical truth has always been a fierce but unseen battle. As Ian Johnson's Sparks shows, today's fighters for the truth are backed by vast armies--the seen and unseen, the living and the dead--who together are prying open the lies on which totalitarianism is built."" -- Cui Weiping, Beijing-based critic and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese ""Sparks is an extraordinary work and a book of exceptional beauty. Ian Johnson details the lives of individuals who have committed themselves to acts of remembrance and possibility. Their writings, art and actions shed light not only on China, but on every place in which underground history is passed -- through principled actions, driven by faith, sorrow or hope -- into the hands of the future."" -- Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing ""China's most famous modern writer Lu Xun predicted that 'as long as there shall be stones, the seeds of fire will not die.' In Sparks, Ian Johnson introduces us to a new generation of unofficial historians--modern-day 'seeds of fire.' Their work will survive the Xi Jinping era, both to shed light on the past and to illuminate China's better future."" -- Geremie R. Barmé, editor, China Heritage ""Sparks is a grand narrative of counter history set against what is officially 'right and true.' This is a necessary book charged with historical urgency, and the sparks, left by the eponymous underground magazine suppressed in the 1950s, are preserved here and ready to burst into a firestorm."" -- Ha Jin, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Boston University ""Ian Johnson uncovers the extraordinary and inspiring story of the army of citizen historians, writers, and filmmakers who keep the flames of memory alive in China's People's Republic of Amnesia, devoting themselves to the discovery, recording, and sharing of history as lived by China's people, from the 1950s labor camps to the present."" -- Isabel Hilton, Contributing Editor, Prospect Magazine ""Ian Johnson's Sparks was a revelation: this historian from overseas spent years penetrating the world of underground Chinese historians, becoming in his own right a recorder of pioneers such as Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Jiang Xue, who use text and video to record China's lost history."" -- Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker, God is Red, For a Song and a Hundred Songs ""This compelling and highly enjoyable book will greatly enhance the general reader's understanding of the subtle counter currents of resistance at work in Chinese society below the smooth surface of control and compliance."" -- Sebastian Veg, author of Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals"

Author Information

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.

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