The rise of China is one of the most remarkable stories of our times, and perhaps one which will define the 21st century. The country, with the second-largest population in the world, often features in the western imagination as a financial and political antagonist, a communist-capitalist ideological chimera – and, to some, a possible roadmap to the future. But in 2024, China is facing a number of problems. Its economy is entering troubled waters, with a real estate bubble close to bursting and demographic collapse all but inevitable (a direct result of the now abandoned “one child policy”). Meanwhile, an ongoing purge in the armed forces, brought on by accusations of widespread corruption, is placing constraints on President Xi Jinping’s geopolitical ambitions.
At the same time, a more subtle conflict is being waged inside China – a war over memory that encompasses the history of the nation and its people. It’s a fight that those of us in the west can’t afford to ignore. In a multi-polar world where instability is on the rise, China’s geopolitical role is shifting. Its war over the truth is likely to be fundamental, not only for Chinese society but for the global influence of the country in the years to come.
It’s into this context that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Johnson has published Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Penguin). Drawing on years of research in China, it captures how some of the country’s best-known writers, filmmakers and artists are attempting to evade Chinese Communist Party censorship and challenge its control over national memory and who gets to decide the “truth”. I sat down with Johnson to discuss this form of dissent and its implications for China, and he told me about his own shifting perceptions of the country over the last three decades.
Johnson was disappointed by his first trip to China. It was 1984 and he was a wide-eyed student of Asian Studies and Journalism at the University of Florida. “This was the China of Great Events: the launch of bold reforms and an era of intellectual ferment unlike any since. Before arriving I had read about the foreigners who had come to China in the Mao era and seen nothing; I had fancied that I would do better,” he wrote in 2011, in the Hong Kong Economic Journal. “And yet I had spent most of my time tooling around the north of Beijing on a bicycle talking to a hodgepodge of foreign students and oddball Chinese. What had I really seen?”
Actually, he realised later, going through his travel diaries, he had seen quite a bit: “compared to today’s budding superpower, this was a messier, odder China, like an old house full of memories that hadn’t yet been spruced up for sale.” While not what he had expected, the trip did not discourage him. He went on to study Sinology at the Free University of Berlin, and Chinese in Taiwan. In 1994, he moved to China to work as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and then the Wall Street Journal. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the persecution of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that emerged in China in the early 1990s.
Falun Gong combines meditation and qigong physical exercises with a moral philosophy. Despite not being explicitly political, the movement was deemed a threat to the state and faced severe suppression starting in 1999. According to Amnesty International, tens of thousands of followers have been arbitrarily detained since then, with many reporting torture or other forms of human rights abuse. The crackdown, Johnson told me, was part of a more general hardening of state control. “There was a feeling that Chinese dissidents had failed,” he said. “That thinkers and political actions had failed.”
Johnson initially bought into that idea, but now he sees things differently. Sparks chronicles that change of heart and is driven by a desire to challenge the stereotype of Chinese conformity. “I was writing a lot for the New York Review of Books,” he told me. “I began a series of Q&As with public intellectuals in China. [...] The issue of history was one that people talked about over and over again.”
A tool of power
Sparks focuses on the efforts of these “underground historians” – including writers, academics, filmmakers and artists – who have faced crackdowns and censorship, but have nonetheless managed to pose a challenge to the CCP in a country where control over historical memory is a key tool of state power.
“When I covered Falun Gong, a lot of Chinese friends said to me that ‘after Falun Gong is crushed, no one will remember or care’, because the only thing that matters in China is pragmatic decisions: making money, owning your apartment and all that,” Johnson said. “And I thought, what a curious idea, that things that matter to us [westerners] don’t matter to Chinese people – that memory doesn’t matter. It’s especially bizarre when you think of the long history of China, the presence of cultural memory. These things do have, they must have a longer life. And as I then started this interview series, I began to realise that it was in fact a burning issue for people.”
Johnson finds his heroes in people like Ai Xiaoming, a leading Chinese documentary filmmaker and political activist, who was awarded the international Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom along with the women’s rights activist Guo Jianmei in 2010. Ai has made more than two dozen films since 2004, notably Taishi Village, which documents the efforts of a local community to stop corruption regarding the sale of their land, and The Epic of the Central Plains, which chronicles a horrific government blunder during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, when rural workers persuaded to sell their “pure” blood to the state were infected with HIV.
Along with these documentaries on rural China, a series on the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, which led to more than 69,000 deaths, has helped to expose the whitewashing of past events at the hands of the Chinese state. For her work, Ai has been banned from leaving China for 10 years, by the end of which she will be over 70 years old.
Major historical events that took place during the reign of Mao Zedong continue to be heavily censored in China today, such as the Great Leap Forward – Mao’s campaign from 1958 to 1962 that aimed to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a socialist society through industrialisation and collectivisation, leading to a catastrophic famine and millions of deaths. Ai’s films have sought to expose the reality of the Great Leap Forward, while filmmaker Wang Bing spent 11 years interviewing more than 120 survivors of a Mao-era labour camp to make his documentary Dead Souls. The film made its world premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and has never been shown in China.
Against historical erasure
Many of the “underground historians” interviewed by Johnson have written entire books covering events over the course of the last century, from Mao’s dictatorship to the current moment, distributing them as PDFs through their digital networks in order to avoid detection. “These aren’t just stories,” Johnson says, “they are testimonies to a burgeoning movement against historical erasure.”
“One of the parameters for writing the book was that I wanted to write about people who are active in Xi Jinping’s China,” Johnson told me. “I would argue this movement started in the late 1990s, early 2000s. It was interesting to me that people were still working on these issues in the 2010s, even as things got tighter, and under very close surveillance.” Things are tougher now, he says. “There has been a crackdown over the past decade. Say, independent film festivals – those don’t exist anymore. They’ve been closed down. Hong Kong used to be a place where you could publish some of these books; that’s closed down.”
Many of the dissidents seem to live with a feeling of intense claustrophobia. Jiang Xue, a formidable investigative journalist and writer who emerged as a prominent figure in the early 2000s, comes across as defiant but melancholy: “People in China, many of us, realise it’s hopeless. How can you change things? It’s hopeless. But you persist. You can’t give up just because it’s hopeless.”
The issue of memory led Johnson in search of creatives, intellectuals and activists. But it also highlighted how the CCP uses and abuses history to root out religion, with horrific consequences for people like the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, whose genocide is directly related to the CCP’s hostile attitude towards Abrahamic religions, especially Islam.
In his previous book, The Souls of China, Johnson writes about a Christmas sermon attended by followers of the Early Rain, a prominent church in Chengdu, the largest city in Sichuan. Known for its outspoken stance on religious freedom and its challenges to the Chinese government’s restrictions on religious practices, the church has been subject to government crackdowns including the arrest of its pastor Wang Yi along with several church members in 2018.
“So the pastor gives his sermon at the beginning of this big banquet they’re going to have for Christmas. But it wasn’t really a service, it was a talk,” Johnson says. “The title was ‘Jesus in Chengdu’. This might seem like an odd title, because Jesus never went to China, but [the pastor] said, if you look at the history of Chengdu, if you go to our most famous high schools, our most famous orphanages, our most famous hospitals, they were all founded by Christian missionaries. It’s just that this history has been erased and you don’t know about it.
“The pastor was trying to tell people that Christianity, rather than being a foreign religion, with absolutely no roots in China, has roots that go back quite a while, and that there has been a permanent Christian presence in China for 400 years, since the Jesuits arrived ... in 1601. That’s the sort of history that a lot of these people think about. Because especially for Christians and Muslims, they’re constantly being told that they’re [followers of] foreign religions. But Islam has been in China for 1,300 years, almost since the beginning of the religion, as Persian traders brought it from the coast. There’s been a Christian presence in China for almost as long as in the United States. In religious communities, they’re very aware of the power of history because they’re constantly having to fight for it. Their history is constantly being suppressed.”
Reservoirs of information
Reclaiming these histories can be important for people’s sense of identity, but will these efforts have a material impact on Chinese politics and society? “The history movement is directly relevant to modern China,” Johnson says, “because it’s challenging the party’s version of modern Chinese history. It’s how you know where it will go in the future. By understanding the past 75 years or past 100 years of CCP history better, you can also think of different outcomes for how China might develop.
“I often think of these people [the underground historians] as resources, as reservoirs of information,” Johnson continues. “If China were to go back to fast economic growth, and Xi Jinping decides to rule with a lighter hand, [to] not be such a hardliner all the time, the party can probably win back a lot of goodwill with the society. And maybe there would not be any demand for these underground [voices]. But that does not seem to be the path he’s following.
“He seems to be following an increasingly conservative economic policy: self-reliance, state-led growth and basically turning his back on the policies that worked over the past decades. If that’s the case, and he continues down that path, then I think there will be slower and slower economic growth in China, more social tensions and more need for these kinds of people.”
Drawing an analogy between China today and the middle period of the Soviet Union, Johnson points to dissidents across the Eastern Bloc whose efforts would only reach the rest of the world after Soviet Communism collapsed, informing our understanding of the processes that brought about its end. “At the time,” he says, “when some of these people were writing and making some publications in the 1960s, they didn’t have a huge following; it was pretty small scale. This was a crucial networking phase of that movement, however. And this is maybe analogous to China. It was, of course, only when the economies of many of these Bloc countries collapsed that they really ran into trouble. China isn’t in such a situation now. But there is now a period of slow growth, and it can get worse.”
If it does, the collected stories from Sparks might prove comparable to The Gulag Archipelago – the monumental work by the Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which chronicled the Soviet Union’s forced labour camp system, known as the Gulag, under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.
A global confrontation with the truth
As our conversation nears its end, Johnson is adamant that ignoring these dynamics inside China would constitute an act of erasure on our part. “Ideally,” he says, “we should pay attention to China, as it represents a significant portion of humanity, about one-sixth. It’s crucial to understand their perspectives and actions, moving beyond the simplistic stereotype of a surveillance state. “Engaging with Chinese culture can greatly enrich our own, especially in understanding debates and struggles surrounding memory and history.”
Johnson mentions the 2016 novel Soft Burial, by the acclaimed writer Fang Fang. Blending mystery and historical fiction, the novel depicts the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when landlords had their land confiscated and were killed in their hundreds of thousands. Attacked for being a work of “historical nihilism”, it was banned in China in 2017, but is available in English translation. Even when works are published in China, translated versions can stick closer to the author’s intent, as they are more likely to avoid censorship.
The west could do much more to engage with Chinese dissident voices, as it did with Central and Eastern European writers and intellectuals, who were well known in educated circles in the later period of the Soviet Union. “Chinese voices lack similar recognition today,” Johnson says. The conclusion of my book advocates for integrating Chinese perspectives into our cultural consciousness. It’s essential to acknowledge the human spirit that persists in countries facing significant challenges, striving to uphold universal values like justice and righteousness, transcending cultural and political confines.”
For Johnson, “this isn’t just about China; it’s a global confrontation with the truth.” He emphasises the parallels between the Chinese context and a broader global reality, where history increasingly becomes the casualty of power struggles.
“Our shared history shapes who we are and what we might become. In Sparks, my aim was to highlight the indomitable spirit of those who defy erasure. Because each act of remembrance is a defiance against the tyranny of forgotten truths,” he says.
This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.
