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

by Ian Johnson

Using history to challenge Communist Party rule.

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 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 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.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Audiobook, Journalism

400 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2023

About the author

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer focusing on society, religion, and history. He works out of Beijing, where he also teaches and advises academic journals.

Johnson has spent over half of the past thirty years in the Greater China region, first as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985, and then in Taipei from 1986 to 1988. He later worked as a newspaper correspondent in China, from 1994 to 1996 with Baltimore's The Sun, and from 1997 to 2001 with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered macro economics, China's WTO accession and social issues.

In 2009, Johnson returned to China, where he writes features and essays for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches undergraduates at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, where he also runs a fellowship program. In addition, he formally advises a variety of academic journals and think tanks on China, such as the Journal of Asian Studies, the Berlin-based think tank Merics, and New York University's Center for Religion and Media.

Reviews

[Nikhil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rulers across time and geography have invoked history to buttress their ‘divine’ right to rule. But probably none can manage the scale and ferocity of the Chinese Communist Party. In a command-and-control regime, they have taken full charge of who, what and how is remembered by their history. Mostly it has resulted in mass distortions and deletions of events and people who are inconvenient to its version of history - typically violent, brutal events that led to the deaths of thousands or even millions - trying to ensure that successive generations only know and remember the ‘glory’ of the CCP and hence its divine right to govern China.

Global audiences, in general, are familiar some such purges of a Chinese history say pertaining to the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square massacre. However, what we know is less than the tip of the iceberg. Even the events that we are familiar with, we have no authenticated data or narrative to build a conclusive picture of such events. More importantly, we do not know anything about hundreds, maybe thousands, of events that the CCP has whitewashed from the pages of time.

Fortunately, no matter how hard the dictators try, there are some totally foolhardy people who are intent on ensuring that the truth survives. Filled with a dogged determination these writers, artists, filmmakers, etc have sacrificed their lives to ensure that the CCP is not entirely successful in distorting the historical narrative. While the advancement of technology with passage of time has probably made their task more possible, it hasn’t mellowed the brutal reprisals by the CCP. Such reprisals have led many to be tortured and put to death for speaking the truth, alone, devoid of family and friends (who have had no choice but to denounce such individuals), driven mad by a system they refused to kow-tow to. Others have kept on the sidelines trying to go about their mission for as long as they can.

Ian Johnson brings these heroes and their stories to the fore thereby ensuring that their efforts are not wasted. Each individual account is equally inspiring and heart-rendering as it exposes the level of violence that seems to be encoded into the DNA of the CCP. Stories about the Hexi Corridor, the Anti-Right Campaign, magazines like Spark, poets like Zhang, and countless individuals who suffered at the hands of the CCP. They take their inspiration from each other and historical figures like Sima Qian, a historian who was castrated by the king for sticking to the truth!

A shocking and disturbing read, but a must read nevertheless.

[Matthew Sun · Rating 5 out of 5]

just so, so powerful and beautifully executed. Ian Johnson is an inspiration in his level of knowledge, care, and insight into some of the most complex and thorny aspects of Chinese history and politics. I loved the temporal structure of the book as well as the way it moved between different historians / activists as foci. will be ordering my own hard copy / rereading in the years to come, I'm sure

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book re-sparked (hehe) my interest in China 🥲

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparks helped me understand how little I know about China and where to go to start balancing my mostly economically focused reading. I had no idea how continuously violent the CCP has been since its founding in 1921. It wasn't just the period of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which were horrific. Violence waxes and wanes but never stops in a way that is more similar to the histories of the Khmer Rouge and Leninist and Stalinist Soviet Union than I had realized. The book introduces a number of underground historians who risk their lives to assure an honest history is preserved and gives snippets from their work. Each snippet made me want to read more by that historian.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened on audiobook. Surprisingly easy to follow despite dense material.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is a fascinating and informative look into a hidden side of Chinese culture: grassroots historians who preserve memories of events excluded from the communist government's official history. These include details of Mao's pre-war ascent to leadership of the communist party, the great famine of 1958-62, the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the suppression of information about COVID-19 until January 2020. Johnson covers a lot of ground and the topic is fragmentary in nature, so the book's structure makes it a little difficult to get into at first. Once I did, though, I found it very rewarding. I hadn't previously come an exploration in English of resistance to Chinese government censorship of the past. Johnson observes that this tendency has intensified in recent decades:

This message became a constant refrain during Xi's first decade in power. The Soviet Union had collapsed because its leaders had allowed alternative versions of history to take root. Later versions of this story, some of them written in books and others told in ominous videos, put the fault much earlier. Instead of Gorbachev being to blame, it was Krushchev and his de-Stalinisation campaign of the 1950s that allowed the rot to set in. In this regard, Xi and Mao were similar. Mao, too, perceived the de-Stalinisation of the 1950s as a debacle, a dangerous admission of error that should not have been allowed. For China, the last great communist power standing, this mistake would not be repeated.

Nonetheless, during the 21st century technology has multiplied the means of recording and spreading information. The Chinese government's control of the internet is extensive but never perfect. Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future collects extensive interviews with historians focused on different localities, periods, and events, but all united by their determination that the government's historical record should not be all that survives.

"As long as Mao Zendong's portrait is hanging on Tiananmen, China will never have freedom or democracy. The day the portrait is gone is the day when China's progress towards freedom and democracy, and the rule of law begins. As long as we hang a Mao portrait there, China will remain a tragedy."
I asked him what the link was to today. Surely this was something remote, something esoteric, only of interest to historians.
"Mao's body died but his ideas haven't. The Communist Party still upholds his ideas, regarding him as a great leader. But all the crimes of the Communist Party come from Mao Zendong, including those committed by Xi Jinping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. Also Deng Xiaoping. This is how China's disasters came about."

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future concludes powerfully by arguing that China's counter-history movement should be more widely acknowledged as peers by academics elsewhere, despite different stakes they face:

By and large most [Western academics] write for other specialists and their ideas circulate only narrowly. China's underground historians consciously aim for the masses. They add to the historical record with new information and accounts, but their goal is action - they are, unapologetically, activists who seek to change society. Western academics might see themselves in the same light, too, but for Chinese public intellectuals it is an existential question. If Western academics fail, they are ignored. If Chinese thinkers fail, they go to jail and sometimes die there.

[Zia Zaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Ian Johnson’s book to learn about untold histories of China. I finish the book with a deeper acknowledgement: Johnson’s book has taught me something new about memory. He lists a number of ways in which memory can be thought of - the most useful being the distinction between stored memory and functional memory. As a technologist I liken it to the difference between magnetic tape storage and disk drive storage. Once the computer has the files accessible via disk, they are readily available to be processed. While stored as tape they are protected but not quite readable. They are nearline not offline or online.

The history of dissent and underground journalism in China is so plainly articulated that this book in a sense takes history and long ago memories and brings them forward to today’s discussion, online, if you will. I enjoyed Ian’s positivity in the face of a relenting leviathan. I enjoyed his mirroring efforts to accurately describe the heroic efforts of the protagonists in the book. And perhaps I was most impressed by the sparks chapter which was so tremendous a piece of reporting and so unknown to me as history that I thought IJ was at times writing a piece of marvellous atwoodian fiction! After a double-take, I would check myself, remember I was reading this as part of my non fiction bookclub, and marvel anew at its ability to tell the missing truth in story form. Memorably and meticulously done! Disclaimer: I am due to meet the author for dinner in four days and am known to be a blunt critic but this time there’s nothing but hurrays.

[Ellen Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Tells the stories of the people who have worked on recent decades and years within China to document and share the ‘counter’ version of history that the CCP denies, and suppresses. Fascinating to look at each person- see their personal and family history, see what led them to the extremely risky calling of documenting this alternate history. I learned a lot and gained a huge appreciation for these people. Worth your time if you want to expand your understanding of modern China.

[M Petro · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a good book. Plenty of great information about some very brave people. Rating is not indicative of the information but how well it kept my interest. I wasn’t driven to read it but more wanted to get through it.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a non-fic about Chinese historians and activists and their attempts to fight against the CCP’s version of the 20th-century Chinese history, where the party keeps silent both about the older stuff (the largest famine in the late 1950s, which killed around 45 million persons), to more recent (Tiananmen square 1989 massacre). It is important that most of them are living (or lived) in China. I know the history of the Soviet underground historians (and activists) and the situation in the PRC is both similar and different, the latter largely because of the technologies, chiefly the Internet.

Each chapter concentrates on a person and event, like the university professor and documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming and his work commemorating victims of the camp called the Ditch, or the journal ‘Spark’ (which gave the title to the book) from 1960, created by young loyal communists, who were not satisfied with the totalitarian rule.

The book also has an appendix with links to sources in Chinese and English for further education, which I now follow.

[Kris Virsilas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian Johnson makes an incredible job of interviewing, researching and putting the contemporary status of Chinese most prominent intellectuals and their resistance against the state.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A masterful work of narrative storytelling and journalism. Lays out the eras of Chinese history and their movements, parties, and rulers, how their shifting priorities, and above all, view of themselves and how they have been, are, and will be remembered by history governs so much of the decision making process. A stark reminder that history is made by the victors, and is not simply a truth telling exercise or a regurgitation of facts and experiences. It is shaped, molded, and utilized as a weapon of control; crafting this collective amnesia to this great nation's past has taken decades of concerted effort and an astounding amount of the country's GDP to achieve, and remains of Xi Jinping's core ideals to this day.

One of the quotes which stuck with me (paraphrased according to my recollection): "The Alexander Solzhenitsyn's of China are writing today in the country, and their works will eventually be made public to the wider world". We know Soviet Russia only after the fall, and I hope that a similar fall is not required in order to free the average citizen from the tight grip of historical censorship, bureaucratic corruption, and the highly rational set of misaligned incentives which govern every level of the politburo in China. What an incredible land, still frankly achieving miracles economically and socially, laboring under leadership who have strayed quite far from their Communist ideals.

-----------------------------

Notes from the book:

This loose collective of what the author calls historians risks imprisonment, exile, or even injury to publish books, magazines, and films which rebuff the communist party propaganda and control of the past. It is impossible to justify current excess and corruption within the communist party if you try to square it with the heroic portrait that has been painted of the communist party in the last 75 years

This book breaks down how this narrative was originally constructed, utilized, and eventually transformed throughout geographical space from the party heartland in the Northwest to the now political and economic centers in the east and south. Secondly it examines this change over time, and third examines them through the lens of the lives of these people themselves.

China is too complex for any sort of simple characterization. There are unbelievable successes as a society mixed in with the truest and gravest human rights issues which are ongoing to this day. There are people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who are writing today about their life in China and those works will be well-known in the future.

China’s first grade historian was castrated for sticking up for a courtier who was being unjustly accused. He was then expected to commit suicide in order to avoid the dishonor of his disfiguration. However he chose to live and to continue writing history. That’s the template Lissette for historian as a sacred calling, worth any sacrifice in China.

Imagine the cultures of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and all of middle-age Europe bound in a single place, with a language still legible to us today, all geographical area about the size of the United States. The past has not even passed, it has likely just been built over. Bygones are never bygones because each place within the country has layers and layers of meaning still visible to us today. This is the reality of modern China

Just as an earlier times, China’s modern leaders to myths to bind the country into a single shared understanding :
- A popular uprising brought the communist party to power
- The great famines have been caused by natural disasters
- The great areas of Xinjiang and Tibet have always been part of China
- Hong Kong struggle for democracy is the work of foreign forces
- The government handled the coronavirus outbreak in a timely and responsible way
- etc.

Since taking power 2012, Xi Jinping has made control of history a domestic priority, closing dozens of unauthorized journals and new sources, closed dozens of museums, and jailed nearly anyone who disagrees with his version of the truth. This has meant not only the aforementioned shuttering of everything from journals to film festivals to books, etc. but a massive state expansion into writing history of themselves. Massive epic films about the parties passed, and an official rewriting of the communist party history, only the third rewrite Ever taken officially by the party. Xi stated that you cannot accept the 30 year reign of Mao without also accepting the next 30 reign of Deng Xiaoping . To accept any truth about the communist party in anytime. Is to accept all about the party across every time., No room for criticism is accepted.

The early years of Mao Zedong’s rule over China is viewed as a golden era, before the majority of the state sanctioned violence took placed. But even in this era there were 2 million citizens who were disappeared. In 1956 he felt that the entire state apparatus needed to change and so launched the hundred flowers campaign. This was based on Confucius idea that if you let 100 flowers bloom you will get 100 varieties of different thought. So argue that this request for criticism was genuine and that they were genuinely overwhelmed by the amount of critiquing they got from the citizen, and some other see it as employee Simply to lure out any who just sent, which was hard to deny based on the violence which followed. Mao struck back violently, ordering nearly every institution to find and route out “rightists”. in addition, he declared that 5% of all people were rightists, and that failure to find up to this amount in an organization meant that the leaders themselves were rightists.

This was essentially a purge on the intelligentsia, with between 550,000 to 1.8 million people being labeled right during this period and purged accordingly.

May no one forget that it is estimated 45 million people died in the great famine after the great week forward. Officials gave falsified numbers to central authorities then text them based on those falsified numbers. This meant they had to give unbelievable amounts of their crop to the central authorities including their planting seed for the following year. Then the backyard steel furnaces were implemented in which poor farmers with wood fired furnaces were supposed to turn that into Steel. What they ended up doing is meltdown their Steel farm equipment and so we’re left with no seed and no farm implements. Thus the great famine.

A quote from officials during the great famine, after normal farmers were resorting to chopping up wheat straw and making a kind of gruel out of it (spoiler, it is inedible for humans): “horses eat straw and they can do all kinds of hard work. Really this is an invention.”
- The farmers then had bloody diarrhea from being unable to digest this food and died

The name Spark was from one of Mao Zedong’s speeches where he stated that “a single spark can start a bushfire.” The people who started this publication were all eventually arrested, some of them executed, and all one and a half copies of this journal documented in the communist governments files on these citizens. This was 10 years into the communist party’s reign in the 1960s.

The Chinese communist party was frightened by the fall of the Soviet Union. To Deng Xiaoping the collapse was due to economics, leading him to bring about massive reforms which are evident over the course of the last four decades. To Xi Jinping, the fall of the Soviets is ideological in nature. They simply stopped believing in the great party, and so the great party fell. This goes a long way to describing the crackdowns of the last 15 years on any type of dissent.

In 2013 a concept called historical nihilism was banned. This was defined as any attempt to cast out on the parties official history, the character or history of Mao, or any other aspect of the communist parties legacy. They rely on regular citizens both in print and online to police themselves. This has led to lawsuits from families of suppose war heroes taken against historians who prove that the events as told could have never happened. The communist party operates according to a documentary form of law, and the communities from their central office carry the force of law.

Xi Jinping’s main focuses are on the ability for each citizen to sustain themselves (thus a deep suspicion for western business enterprise, and a strong bent towards state led development), Rooting out corruption in order to remove any obstacle toward an extremely strong central government, and enforcing a singular collective memory through the control of history as well as current communications.

Each major and minor city writes its own gazettes, which creates the official history of that region. This becomes the primary source for all tourist information, as well as children’s textbooks. Before it’s released, and editing team made up of party officials reviews every single document before release. It is possible to compare current gazettes to previous additions, and compare the changes overtime. Whereas in most countries topics get easier to discuss more forthrightly overtime, in China the opposite is true. Over the course of the last 40 years the events and their histories have gotten more censored and more distorted each time they are remembered.

Collective amnesia is what happens when overtime the survivors of each incident or tragedy die and so all that is left behind is the official government version. Most people only know what they have directly experienced

The difference between stored memory and functional memory is that stored memory only takes that history having been preserved on some medium, whether it be paper or any other physical material, or whether it be digital. Functional memory means that that information can actually be used. For nearly the entirety of the Chinese communist party Stored a great deal of memory with much detail, but none of it was functional as it has been locked away. With the rise of the Internet and social media and digital sharing, much of this memory has now become functional for the very first time

It is a better comparison to compare modern China to the 1960s Soviet Union which looked dominant and in control, rather than the 1980s Soviet Union which was declined. There are many tired clichés which we should retire about China, the first among them being that China is a simple example of out of control authoritarianism. The gaps that the Chinese government has created and it’s official history resemble very closely huge gaps in the history of the United States and its record of slavery, for example.

[mickeyy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That’s why the past matters. It might have happened before you were born but it still affected you. You just didn’t realize it because you didn’t know about it.” …

“Of course, the people profiled in these pages will grow old, die, possibly be arrested, or fade away. But if the history of this movement has taught us anything, it is that it has grown with time, despite set-backs. We can look at individual battles and see defeat. But we can also see an endless cycle of creation, of new sparks that leap off the flint of history every time it is struck.”

so good

[Diane]

New Yorker review in Oct 2, 2023 issue by Ian Buruma: "superb, stylishly written..."

[Ming · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible overview of underground historians in China. Great recommended reads at the end as well.

[Minty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fascinating book - reading this has been a labour of love I've never annotated something more. So many brave and inspiring individuals marking down a history that they won't get credit for but they know it's important to preserve for some day in the future.

[Oliver Shields · Rating 5 out of 5]

There would be a lot to say about how underrated the subject matter of this book is: historical nihilism as a cultural and political movement in China. Maybe I'll make a video about it.

[iamdianacolucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illuminante ❤️

[Mal Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

DIGGING OUT THE TRUTH ABOUT MAO ZEDONG

History exerts a powerful force on the present. Why else would battles rage over the historical record around the world? In the United States, for example, some insist slavery was the central driver in our history, while others fight back fiercely. And in Russia, where the Putin regime seeks to downplay Stalin’s crimes while millions of Russians resist, remembering the pain. But nowhere has the war over history been waged with such determination, or the facts so deeply buried, as in China. Journalist Ian Johnson exposes the truth about Chinese history in Sparks. He shows how Xi JInping is rewriting the story of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic campaigns to re-engineer Chinese society. But Johnson doesn’t dwell on the mechanisms of the Party’s totalitarian reach. Instead, he introduces us to those courageous individuals who risk the threat of prison or worse to report and preserve the truth about China’s past.

A NATIONWIDE NETWORK OF STUBBORN TRUTH-TELLERS

As Johnson writes in a preface, “For modern Chinese leaders, history legitimizes their hold on power: history chose the Communist Party to save China; history has determined that it has succeeded; and history blesses its continued hold on power. This history is of course written by the party, . . But a growing number of Chinese see the Party’s monopoly of the past as the root of their country’s current authoritarian malaise.” Johnson calls these people underground historians “as a shorthand for a broad group of some of China’s brightest minds.”

These underground historians “have melded into a nation-wide network that has survived repeated crackdowns.” They’re academics. Independent filmmakers. Underground magazine publishers. Novelists, artists, and journalists. What unites them is a passionate commitment to dig out the truth about some of the sorriest episodes in China’s past and place it into the historical record. Some reach an audience domestically through social media as well as readers outside the Great Firewall. But most know that few if anyone will see what they’ve learned until many years have elapsed. Still, the truth will have been told.

DEFYING XI JINPING AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY

The courageous underground historians profiled in Sparks are exploring the darkest chapters in China’s history under Mao Zedong. Defying Xi Jinping and the Party he dominates, they’re systematically bringing into the light eyewitness testimonies that give the lie to the Party line. About the land reform of the early 1950s, when millions of peasants were identified as “landlords” and murdered. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of the mid-50s, when Mao cracked down on freethinking officials after drawing them out into the open in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The Great Leap Forward, which led to the deaths by starvation of as many as forty-five million people in the Great Famine that ensued. And, of course, the Cultural Revolution, that spasm of homicidal violence triggered by Mao’s effort to outflank his enemies in the Party. All this and more is grist for the historians’ mill, challenging Xi Jinping’s effort to rehabilitate Mao.

Johnson tells this story by visiting “places of memory” scattered all across the vast Chinese homeland. Battlefields. A former labor camp for political prisoners. Poor villages where students “sent down” in the Cultural Revolution worked, and sometimes died. And the National Museum of China that flanks Tiananmen Square, which glorifies Xi’s whitewashed history. At these and other historic spots we meet the men and women whose selfless labors hold out hope for a future era in China when people matter more than the Party.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his articles on the persecution of the Falun Gong in China, among many other honors for his writing. A Canadian-born American, he lived for a total of twenty years in Beijing and is one of the nation’s most knowledgeable and insightful observers of the country. Sparks is the fourth of his books and the third about China. He has also written numerous essays and articles for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Johnson studied journalism and Asian affairs at the University of Florida and received a master’s degree in Sinology from the Free University of Berlin. Currently, he is working on a PhD on Chinese religious associations at Leipzig University.

[Ram · Rating 4 out of 5]

History is written by the victors and in the case of totalitarian states by the state. Especially in a country like China with its vast population, long and rich history, delicate political situation and complex ruling challenges, the rulers use history as a way of justifying their actions and actual right to rule.
On the other hand, there is the population and the people that want to know and record the truth. In many cases, the truth is not in accordance with the same line as the state narrative and in many cases, investigating the events, reporting the events, teaching the events or referring to the true events in any way can get you in serious trouble, and bring on you the full wrath of the system.


This book delves into the world of underground historians in China, who are engaged in a battle to preserve the nation's rich history and culture amidst political censorship and government suppression. The book highlights several key historians who play pivotal roles in this clandestine endeavor.


One of the main historians featured is Zhang Xianling, a mother who lost her son during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Despite facing immense personal tragedy, Zhang has dedicated her life to uncovering the truth about the government's crackdown on pro-democracy activists and advocating for justice for the victims.


Another prominent figure is Xiao Li, a former journalist who turned to underground activism after witnessing firsthand the extent of government censorship and propaganda. Xiao Li focuses on documenting the stories of marginalized communities, including ethnic minorities and rural villagers, whose voices are often silenced by the authorities.


The book also introduces readers to Zhao Ma, a tech-savvy historian who utilizes innovative methods and technology to circumvent government censorship and preserve historical records. Zhao Ma employs encrypted communication channels, digital archives, and blockchain technology to safeguard valuable historical documents and ensure their accessibility to future generations.


In addition to profiling these courageous historians, "Sparks" explores the main topics they deal with, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Through their research and activism, these historians aim to shine a light on the dark corners of China's past and present, challenging official narratives and advocating for a more transparent and just society.


Overall, this book offers a compelling glimpse into the world of underground activism in China and the individuals who risk their safety and freedom to preserve the nation's history and advocate for a better future. On the way, we get a slice of Chinese culture, history and the challenges that face China's population and administration.

[Minervas Owl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book chronicles the efforts of independent writers, filmmakers, journalists, and artists in China who challenge the Chinese Communist Party's control over historical narratives. For those familiar with the Chinese dissident circle, much of the material may feel familiar and not particularly new. However, I still appreciate reading the book for several reasons:

1. The book unveils the courageous work of a group of students who published the "Sparks" magazine in 1960, a significant historical event I was previously unaware of. Their organized resistance against tyranny during the height of totalitarianism deeply surprised and moved me. I also learned about the connection between Lin Zhao and the magazine, which I hadn't known before. Additionally, the romance between two key characters added another layer to the narrative. This is a story that every Chinese person should read. I hope that one day, the story will be featured in Chinese textbooks, non-fiction works, and novels. I wish I would walk into a museum in 天水, and watch a documentary about these brave individuals.

2. It was enlightening to learn the personal stories of intellectuals and such as 高华, 艾晓明, and 江雪. Understanding how their family and childhood experiences motivated their actions was particularly insightful.

3. I find it saddening that even after years of reading, my historical knowledge was still limited by the CCP's narrative. For example, I knew little about how Kuomintang's army fought against the Japanese, including successful battles such as 徐州会战. Additionally, I hadn't realized the link between the famous slogan 放卫星 and Mao's envy of the USSR's achievements with Sputnik during that period.

Overall, for those well-read in the dissident circle, the book is a faithful record but not particularly inspiring. However, it serves as a great resource for people unfamiliar with independent historical narratives. For those interested, a Chinese netizen is currently translating the book into Chinese and has posted the first few chapters online: https://matters.town/@yxh66.

Side Note:
- Ian Johnson mentioned that the first people's commune was named "Sputnik," but I couldn't find evidence of this. What I found is that it was named 嵖岈山卫星人民公社.
- Ironically, those who most need to read this book may not be interested. How can we address that?
- Coincidentally, one of my favorite songs is named "Sparks" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5kpL..., by Beach House), and I happened to be listening to it while writing this review. Unsurprisingly, the combined emotional impact of the song and the book brought me to tears.

[David Baer · Rating 5 out of 5]

China lurks there on the Asian landmass, a massive, inscrutable, and above all, authoritarian presence. China, land of homogenously ambitious communists. Land of Xi Jinping. Poised and ready to eat the world.

This book is a wonderful insight into the complexity that is Chinese culture, which is anything but homogenous across the nominal territory on the globe (which territory I will forever think of as orange, due to the globe I obsessively perused as a child).

Going back to the so-called Axial age – about 2500 years ago, I got an amazing factoid about on Chinese writing originated. In Babylon, used clay tablets for the first writing system; in Egypt, papyrus. In China, an early form of writing as done on flat strips of bamboo, the strips being about the shape of a chopstick. These strips were fastened to the left forearm as the writer inscribed them with the right hand. This is why, for millennia, Chinese wrote their script top to bottom, right to left.

Mostly, though, this book is not about ancient history, but rather about the history that is happening now. A lot of Chinese history has happened in the span of a single lifetime starting from WWII. A lot of Chinese are not homogenous representatives of the Communist Party, not content to swallow and internalize the manufactured historical narrative that Xi (fascinatingly) has been so at pains to construct, control of history being a strategic mechanism for cementing power by association, in the minds of the uncomprehending, of the CP with everything good and modern.

China is a place where you can be arrested for “Stirring Quarrels and Creating Trouble” – a charge liable to come from the act of publishing an online journal.

I glossed over the names of the numerous, diverse, and incredibly courageous people mentioned in the text. Most of these people do not speak English, and are unknown in the West. They toil quietly, their historical records reaching only a limited audience even within China. Their work of remembrance promises to preserve the ability of present and future generations to precisely delineate the many crimes and horrors committed during the time of Mao, a figure whose portrait still receives official lip service by the entrenched, hereditary crypto-aristocracy that is today’s Chinese CP.

“Sitting silently while one’s spirit travels far.” There’s a Chinese character for that; a metaphor for Chinese society. How marvelously alien.

Shout out to The China unofficial archives. "/www.minjian-danganguan.org/"

[Kate Schwarz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional!

Things I want to remember:

In talks with senior officials that year, he pointed to the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier that year in 1991, an event that has haunted Chinese leaders ever since. To Dung, economics was behind the Soviet Union's collapse, spurring him to launch a new round of reforms in the 1990s. For Xi, however, the Soviet Union fell because no one believed in its ideology anymore. People began to doubt its achievements. Independent groups like Memorial unearthed evidence of Stalin's atrocities. But the leadership in Moscow didn't crack down. As Xi put it, "Their ideals and convictions wavered. Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet communist party and the great party was gone. In the end, nobody was a real man. Nobody came out to resist." This message became a constant refrain during Xi's first decade in power. The Soviet Union collapsed because its leaders had allowed alternative versions of history to take root. Later versions of this story put the fault much earlier--instead of Gorbachev to blame, it was Krushev and his de-Stalinization of 1950s campaign allowed the rot within the communist part (and Soviet Union) to begin, and it only grew. This should not have been allowed--and the mistake would not be repeated.

Protests on Tienamen Square... he escaped to the embassy and was waiting to leave. He and his family lived 13 months in the embassy in a windowless room that had once served as a clinic. In the depths of his despair, Fong wrote that "Chinese amnesia" an essay that explains why tragedies kept befalling his country. The communist party, he wrote, controlled history so thoroughly that the bast majority of people remained unaware of its endless cycles of violence. The result was that people only knew what they personally experience.d If they had lived through the cultural revolution, they would remember that, but not the Great Famine a decade earlier. He recalled that young people who had just participated in Tiananmen didn't know about the democracy wall movements of the 1970s, let alone the cultural revolution or the great famine. Each new generation was ignorant of the past, Fong wrote, making people susceptible to the party's indoctrination campaigns.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

They say that history is written by those who win power struggles. This is about the history being written about the People’s Republic of China since Mao’s takeover.

If you’re like me, you really know next to nothing about China so this was a very interesting history of communism past, present and future. The geography, names, and their pronunciations were mostly new to me, so I was often retreating to a map of China or using a pronunciation app while going through this book.

This book is about censorship, control of information, rewriting of history to bury stories of past atrocities/genocide/gratuitous violence. And these Chinese leaders were/are vicious, and the Chinese people who carry out these acts of violence (aka “purges”) should make everybody afraid of what could happen with a China looking to expand (hello Africa, are you listening?). The horrors of what they have done to their own citizens would no doubt be magnified when faced with “other” peoples.

However the premise of the book is presumably not to scare people but to suggest that unless the Chinese can come to a reconciliation with its past, they are doomed to repeat past historical mistakes over and over. The author believes the best China would be a free and democratic China, with freedom of speech, a system of governmental checks and balances, the courage to innovate etc.

There are underground historians who are collecting the data/proof/stories of China’s communist era, but they work knowing the hammer could drop at any moment. They are purpose driven as they recognize their work will outlive them, but they are in a very perilous position.

Highly recommended for people living in a democracy because it shows you what living in a dictatorship looks like and feels like.

[Jared Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't recommend Ian Johnson's Sparks enough. Before I'd even finished my first read, I knew I wanted to dedicate my dissertation to some of the themes Johnson sets out. I'm particularly interested in the contradiction between China's leaders being as determined as ever to "dominate . . . textbooks, museums, films, and tourist spots" and make "control of history a top domestic priority" (9), while counter-official narratives about the past proliferate online.

Johnson balances breadth and focus remarkably well, providing historical context while spotlighting key people and events that give meaning and texture to the book's themes. Particularly illuminating is his treatment of the underground Spark journal, published at the height of the Great Leap famine in 1960, alongside more contemporary figures like Ai Xiaoming, a feminist scholar and documentary filmmaker who travels the country recording oral histories, and Jiang Xue, an independent journalist known for her viral "Ten Days in Xi'an" quarantine diary who has turned to excavating the past.

Johnson argues persuasively that the intergenerational amnesia that characterized the country's political life as recently as the 1990s has given way to a more fluid memoryscape. Today, China's leaders face a digital dilemma: technology simultaneously amplifies and fractures official messaging, leaving space amid the cracks for alternative renderings of the past.

[EC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting overview of the individuals working diligently to uncover and preserve Chinese history-- I'll certainly be following up on a number of the journalists, publications, and books cited here. As someone woefully unfamiliar with China's history (aside from a chapter or two in other books, largely in reference to Mao's disastrous economic and social policies), I appreciated the chance to orient myself in the 20th and early 21st centuries and to dip a little into the reasons why historians of all people would have such a powerful cultural salience for China.

While I liked Johnson's macro structuring of the book, individual chapters left me with the sense they needed additional editing to smooth the transition between past and present. The disjointedness had me flipping back and forth to make sure I was fully understanding what transpired to which family within what geography. In truth, expanding the chapters would have been another solution-- I'd have certainly been interested in more depth for both past context and the present circumstances of the people he profiles. Others may find the length of the book more inviting and manageable (a reasonable goal for someone interested in spreading the work of these determined citizens), but I felt rushed at times.

Net: Learned a lot, would recommend

[Kirill Korolev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many in the West are wont to view China as an autocratic hellscape and its people a brainwashed monolith, passively regurgitating whatever nationalist slop the government has deigned to feed them. Ian Johnson's Sparks, however, paints a completely different picture of the Chinese people -- one of stubborn resistance. Sparks documents China's underground counter-historian movement, starting from Su Dongpo's implicit criticism of the government through his allusion to the Battle of the Red Cliffs and culminating in the various protests against the government's botched COVID-19 response.

The Chinese people have had a long history of grappling with their history, trying to reconcile the government-approved version of history with the one that lies dormant in their minds, spoken of only in hushed tones or veiled allusions. Certain events like the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen protests are still kept under lock and key by the ruling government. Sparks chronicles the long list of dissidents who have dared to question the government's near-mythical account of history, providing a compendium of Chinese and English language primary and secondary accounts which I, for one, will dive into in the near future. May these dissidents continue their march towards transparency and may they succeed in building a more democratic China!

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be succinct, Ian Johnson, a long-time observer of the China scene, who was ultimately kicked out of China by the Xi Jinping regime, is giving you a two-track study.

On one hand, there is the tireless effort of the Chinese Communist Party against "historical nihilism." That is to say, the struggle to make sure that the self-serving notion that the CCP dominance in China was inevitable and that all who are a threat to this will be cut down. Xi's own family suffered from this sort of thinking under Mao, but that hasn't prevented him from playing that game with maximum effort.

On the other hand, one has the "Underground Historians," those who try to remember the past as it actually happened, and honor the victims of the CCP's crimes, so that there is at least a little accountability, in the hopes that one day some real justice will be done. Johnson's recounting of the time that he's spent with these people is the real emotional core of the book.

Johnson argues that will it is convenient to write-off the hope that there might be something better in China's future, despite all the pressure public push-back continues, and there is a real sense that the CCP's best days are behind it. The question is how much damage they do on the way out.

[Scott Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very great book that I'd recommend everyone interested in this area to read. The book provides many indepth profiles of "counter historians" (i.e. against the official State narrative of that time) which span the entire geography and history of China. There are many great examples within the book but I found it very notable how paranoid the State has become when now simply acknowledging the mass starvation and widespread massacres of the past (due to the CCP) is viewed as "historical nihilism" or "politically sensitive". The CCP has no shame for the atrocities they have committed and will and have always sought absolute power over their own citizens regardless of the cost.

These are very inspiring portraits of people doing the right thing and documenting true history even in the face of overwhelming obstacles and interference. I hope one day all of the stories within this book will be able to be openly told and shared within the country they are most relevant to.

[Kelly Ng · Rating 4 out of 5]

This extensively researched book tells of the people who were sidelined, hounded, jailed, even killed, for challenging - overtly or covertly - the Chinese Communist Party's white-washing of history. These stories are heartrending when I think of what these "underground historians" have given up - many of them lost their lives in their attempts to give voice to experiences that do not align with the party's narrative.

But taken together, they are also encouraging. Because they are evidence that independent, critical thought exists even with the country's surveillance machine and more muscular authoritarianism. Over the generations, counter-historians have found ways to make their comeback.

The book had me looking up the books, journals and films that documented these "counter histories" and the people behind them. I read a copy from the library but I'm now thinking of buying one - primarily for its bibliography.