Sparks
China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A FINANCIAL TIMES AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
‘Johnson’s stories bring … this history chillingly alive’ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times
'An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read ... It's a privilege to read books like these' Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers
A documentary filmmaker who uncovered a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid; a magazine publisher who dodged the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground - its monopoly on history.
In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule.
But in recent years, critical thinkers from across the land have begun to challenge 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-21st century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Johnson (The Souls of China) delivers a striking account of people who have defied authority to document negative aspects of life under the Chinese Communist Party. According to Johnson, as each iteration of the party tries to erase the past, each new generation produces its own "underground historians" (a shorthand for "university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists") who are "ready to spring into action when the state's guard is down." For example, he recounts the saga of Spark, a short-lived underground journal published in the northwest city of Tianshi in 1960 by a group of young people exiled to the countryside to do farm work. Before it was shut down, Spark challenged Mao's cult of personality and blamed party mismanagement for the famine and starvation of the Great Leap Forward. After the rise of the internet, online communities brought together more dissident voices. It was online citizen journalists, Johnson notes, who told the world what was going on in Wuhan at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. He highlights the story of Li Wenliang, a young ophthalmologist who was punished by the state for spreading rumors after he warned his colleagues about the new disease. This immersive survey combines interviews, firsthand reportage, and historical research to paint a moving group portrait of China's political dissidents.
