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

"It’s not about formal historians, which I think is interesting given its title. This actually came up at one of Johnson’s book launch events, the one at UC Irvine where I teach. One of the questions from the audience was from my department’s historian of Vietnam and she wondered why Johnson didn’t talk about academic historians. Johnson noted that he talks about a couple of historically minded academics, just ones in other disciplines. In a sense, he’s talking about a particular kind of documentarian, but that’s not as nice a word to use in a title. His book is about people who are trying to document things that have happened that the party-state is trying very hard to sweep under the rug and to get people to forget about. I’d also say that even though he skips over discussing historians per se, he has crafted a powerful book that definitely qualifies as a work of history as well as of journalism. It’s about engagement with history. It’s about recent history, the period since the Communist Party took power, although there are also interesting stories to tell about the politics of history in earlier periods. It’s very focused, and what drives it, in part, is how compelling the profiles of the individuals involved are—people who are making these very risky moves to unearth stories from the past that deserve to be told. These people are not really what we think of as dissidents: they’re people who are trying to work within the system, but within the crevices in the system. “I decided to think about it as the ‘best books’ to recommend to busy general readers” One of the most important things about the book is the way it pushes back against any idea of a brainwashed population that has either completely accepted official lines or given up on the idea of being able to push back against them. It captures a sense of the struggle to keep alive alternative views of the past that’s happening inside of the PRC in these very daring ways. It also connects with efforts outside of the PRC, including by young people from China who are doing things like posting images of things that are banned on the internet inside their home country. Posting them outside of China allows them to filter back into the country. At the end, he brings up the ‘White Paper’ protests that happened just over a year ago. Slogans were put up on a Beijing bridge in a lone act of protest in October 2022. The banners were taken down, but images of them were posted on the internet and on campuses outside China and then circulated back into China. Those slogans came up when people took part in the protests, which were specifically against a zero-COVID policy that had gone on too long and been accompanied by abuses but were also used to express other concerns about repressive and autocratic actions of many kinds. The book is very interesting about how even things that are almost suppressed and circulate in these underground ways can keep alternative visions from being extinguished. Johnson includes some very interesting comparisons with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc in general, during the Cold War . He refers a lot to Central and Eastern European parallels and precedents. These are things that Chinese intellectuals think about as well: Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt and others are looked to as models. One is the acts of horrific violence in the 1950s that there’s no place for in the official record – things like the killings of not only landlords, but people who were connected to landlords’ families, or people who were presented as rightists. When people talk about the suppression of memory in China, people outside of China often focus on the Cultural Revolution – a specific moment – and Tiananmen Square, the massacre of June 4th near there . Those are two different examples. With the June 4th massacre, there’s an effort to blot out the very fact that it took place. With the Cultural Revolution, there’s an effort to minimize the horrors of it to quite specific things and then move on. The underground documentarians in Sparks are also interested in other periods that are suppressed: earlier purges and struggle sessions that ended up with people being beaten up or killed or pressured into suicide, which came before the Cultural Revolution. These get less attention from even critics of the Chinese Communist Party because they fall out of these few moments that loom large in foreign and exile historical accounts. It’s not that there aren’t academic historians and others who are writing about those things outside of China, but to be inside of China and trying to keep alive the suffering of people in the 1950s is a key part of this. Yes, the grand tradition of the historian as a daring figure. Sima Qian was long before, but there are academic historians who’ve tried to carve out those spaces, too. If Johnson were going to bring in an academic historian, he could have written about Sun Peidong, who is a historian of the Cultural Revolution and taught courses at Fudan on the Cultural Revolution, presenting it as a complicated historical moment in China, for as long as she could. She was pressured to leave, in part by nationalistic students who objected to what she was doing, but also by the constricting space in China. She left to go to Paris and now is teaching at Cornell. There are also examples of people who are using their fiction to do similar things. Fang Fang, the author of Wuhan Diary (which was nonfiction), has a novel coming out next year in translation (with the talented Michael Berry doing the honors) that’s set in the early 1950s, about the violence of the land reform period. Yan Lianke has written novels–many available in English in very fine Carlos Rojas translations–about these kinds of things as well. Fiction is mentioned in passing in Johnson’s book, but it’s not a focus. When I was listening to one of his talks, I thought a work of fiction that could fit into his book is Lu Xun’s classic short story “Diary of a Madman.” The madman, who may see things clearly, imagines the official record of the Chinese past – the Confucian, prettified version of the past – and interspersed within each line are horrific descriptions of people eating people. It’s this idea of a counter-history of brutality that gets left out of the sanitized version of a history. You have these competing versions of an official version of the past and a counter version. It links up to a lot of interesting things in Chinese culture. One of the recurring themes in official histories by new ruling groups, which we saw before the revolutionary period, is you want to emphasize the things that were done that caused suffering before you took power, and then figure out a way to emphasize the successes after that. For the Communist Party, while there’s a willingness to accept that mistakes were made, there’s an attempt to say that’s not the main theme. Part of the goal of the underground historians is to show, just by presenting the sheer accumulation of suffering, that to present this as a minor theme in the history of post-1949 China is to make a mockery of any notion of a truthful account."