Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future – Ian Johnson

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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.

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent most of his adult life in China, working as a correspondent for The New York Times, New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of other books that also 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.