Asymmetrical warfare in the battle over China’s past

Ian Johnson’s latest book, Sparks, focuses on writers, filmmakers, artists, and historians in China pushing back against a Chinese Communist Party increasingly obsessed with controlling history. Johnson traveled the country interviewing men and women who are working — often at significant professional and personal risk — to document China’s recent past.

A journalist-turned-academic, Johnson combines a researcher’s scholarly discipline with a reporter’s eye for detail and storytelling. His previous book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, published in 2017, remains one of the best works for understanding modern China published in the last decade.

All nations craft narratives. Deciding what goes in (and is left out) is critical to shaping national mythologies. There are fierce debates in Florida and other parts of the United States over high school history classes, controversies in Europe and North America about the names on buildings and the fate of statues, ongoing concerns about what is not included in Japanese textbooks, and laws in Germany regarding discussion of the Holocaust. Whataboutists would argue these justify the actions of China’s government. All countries do it; why single out China?

For one, few countries have a leadership as insecure and paranoid about the past as China’s. Moreover, things can be similar and not be the same. My cat Pumpkin shares 96% of her DNA with that of a Bengal tiger. That is a remarkable overlap, but the last 4% decides whom I prefer having at the foot of my bed every night. Or, as Ian Johnson argues more eloquently, the stakes are higher for those challenging narratives in China than in countries with a more open information environment: “If Western academics fail, they are ignored. If Chinese thinkers fail, they go to jail and sometimes die there.”

Johnson begins, appropriately enough, with Sima Qian, the Han Dynasty historian famous for his decision to submit to castration rather than execution after his candid historical assessments angered the emperor. The modern-day equivalent of Sima Qian, argues Johnson, are “Underground Historians” engaged in a form of asymmetrical resistance against a powerful state. Their goal: “To challenge, destabilize, and contest the state’s version of reality. With success by no means certain, they carry on believing that history vindicates the truth.” It is telling that many of these historians began their crusades in the early 2000s when small — but shrinking — spaces for discourse remained somewhat open, and the advent of new technologies like digital cameras, USB drives, editing software, and file sharing made building online and offline communities where these underground historians could share their work possible.

This work takes many forms. Ài Xiǎomíng 艾晓明 produces films about survivors of the notorious prison camp at Jiabiangou in Gansu, a place perhaps best known by Wáng Bīng’s 王兵 2010 film The Ditch. Ai is less interested in the past than present attempts to erect a memorial at the site; an attempt to do so almost succeeds until local officials realize that even a tombstone to honor the thousands of people incarcerated there during the Anti-Rightist movements of the 1950s, many of whom died and were buried in mass graves around the prison, was too powerful.

The underground history journal Spark, from which Johnson takes the title of his book, was first published in the 1960s, seeking to document the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the effects of starvation in impoverished outposts like Tianshui in Gansu. Few people ever read the original, and most of the early contributors and editors were eventually rounded up, imprisoned or executed. One of the surviving members of the group behind Spark was allowed to see her government file in the 1990s and was shocked to discover issues of the underground journal, as well as other notes and materials, were included. She copied them, and in 2013, Spark, the journal, became the subject of a film by documentarian Hu Jie.

In a later chapter, the contributors and editors of the historical newsletter Remembrance debating whether or not those involved in high-profile acts of violence — notably the brutal 1966 killing of Biàn Zhòngyún 卞仲耘, the deputy principal of a Beijing school attended by many children from elite Party families — should apologize, and whether that’s even possible. There are also Wú Dí’s 吴迪 efforts to document the killing and imprisonment of thousands of people in Inner Mongolia, many of them of Mongolian ethnicity. Others carry out research into the horrifying murder spree that swept through Dao County in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution; or the extreme violence that accompanied many of the efforts to redistribute land in the earliest days of the P.R.C. These subjects are not part of the official record, and efforts to remember them are met with resistance.

China is not the only place where this happens. The efforts to get the city of Tulsa to reckon with the two-day-long orgy of violence against the Black community between May 31 and June 1, 1921, has taken decades and met fierce opposition from both the city and white residents of Tulsa. This is just one example of a horrifying moment in a different historical context, but similar is not the same, as any quick search of a library collection in Oklahoma for information about the Tulsa Race Riots versus a search done in Hohhot about the fate of ethnic Mongolians in the Cultural Revolution should reveal.

Johnson cites “The Chinese Amnesia,” by Fāng Lìzhī 方励之, the late astrophysicist and activist who fled into exile following the 1989 June 4 massacre. Fang argued that the Party’s goal was to atomize memory: Each generation or person or group can remember their own personally experienced trauma, but the Party’s control over the writing of official history was designed to thwart those who try to fit their experiences into a “Wait…that happened to you too” mosaic. It would be easy to look at China today and see the apex of these efforts. Even something as recent as the zero-COVID policy, which locked down cities and communities for weeks and even months just last year, is subject to intense measures to make people forget their own lived experiences, never mind linking their stories with others who experienced the same. Yet Johnson finds hope in the efforts of amateur historians, filmmakers, writers, documentarians, and archivists to preserve a past in danger of being scrubbed from the official records.

Some observers may raise questions of relevance. Who cares if a few cranks are publishing blogs or shaky videos that raise questions, offer conspiracy theories, or otherwise try to throw a few bits of grit into the eye of state orthodoxy? To ask these questions misses the point: If these underground historians are so fringe as to be nearly irrelevant or impotent, then why does the state expend so many resources — both financial, technological, and human — to punish them?

It would be easy to come away from Johnson’s book with a deep sense of pessimism and even fatalism. The Party is in power. They are relentless in controlling the narrative. By and large, they have succeeded. Yet Sparks can also be read as a celebration of the human spirit, bringing attention to those who labor on projects that might not, in their lifetimes, even see the light of day. The Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian chose humiliation to finish his work despite official opposition. Now, he is considered one of the greatest historians in human history, and his records are invaluable guides to China’s past. Johnson quotes a famous letter in which Sima Qian laments, “The reason I have continued to live is that I grieve to think that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to fully express, and am ashamed to think that after I am gone, my writing will not be known to posterity.” Perhaps one day, the work of the historians included in Sparks will be similarly appreciated.

Also see:

Ian Johnson on “Sparks,” his new book on China’s underground historians