Ian Johnson - "Sparks" Foreword

Even in the darkest of times, we still have the right to hope for light. This light may not come from theories or concepts, but from certain men and certain women - those flickering, flickering, often weak lights, from their creations and lives. This light is lit almost all the time and shines throughout their lives. Such beliefs formed an indescribable backdrop against which their outlines were being drawn. For eyes like ours that are accustomed to darkness, it is difficult to tell whether their light is the glimmering candlelight or the blazing sun.

--Hannah Arendt｜People in the Dark Ages

Preface

If there is one trend that people all over the world are following, it must be the use of historical narratives as a gladiatorial arena in order to compete for the right to speak today. Maybe it has always been like this since ancient times. People cannot predict the future, so they can only look for clues in the past. Let us look at the country we are in. Whether it is Africa, America, Asia or Europe, history is full of controversies. Americans debate the central point of slavery in American history, Europeans disagree over the brutality of the colonial era, and young Africans unearth buried memories of Nigeria's civil war and apartheid era. We can also easily find that in Japan, Singapore, India and many other countries, events that occurred before most people were born are important nodes in shaping the future of these countries.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more vivid than in China, a country that for a thousand years has been entangled in the interplay of past, present and future. For the leaders of modern China, history has given them the legitimacy to hold power: history has chosen the Communist Party to save China; history has determined the party's successful rise to power; history has also protected the party's continued power. Of course, such history must be history written by the Party, which has hired a large group of historians, film producers, photographers and reporters to compile orthodox historical events from ancient times to the present. Through these individuals, the Party controls historical narratives in textbooks, films, television documentaries, published history magazines, and even video games.

But more and more Chinese people realize that the party's monopoly on the past is the root of the country's authoritarian system. They believe that too many people misunderstand current issues because the Communist Party has distorted the narrative of history. If people have believed since childhood that the Communist Party of China is the anti-Japanese hero, that the Communist Party was established because of the support of the people, and that the leaders of the Communist Party are elite patriots, then it will be difficult for them to understand why there are so many counter-revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in China. Purges, massive corruption and bloody political violence.

Belief in the importance of history has fueled a movement of underground historians that has flourished over the past two decades. I see these grassroots historians as a group of stenographers documenting a broader group of people, those most liberal in China: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists. Some of them are outsiders and are considered dissidents, but most are embedded in the system. They have their own jobs, their own homes, and their families to support. They risked losing their jobs, losing their prospects, and even going to jail to publish samizdat, banned books, and independent documentary films. They seek to correct the party's distortion of the past and prevent their country from slipping into ever-tighter authoritarian control. They seek to use new technologies to publicize the failures of the current system and connect current problems to past disasters.

In China, concern for the past is a long tradition. As today, emperors in ancient times hired historians to write their official histories. But there are a large number of unofficial historians, and the books they write have a sensational name - unofficial history, which literally means unorthodox. Today it is more commonly known as folk history, or grassroots history, and similar content in other countries is called counter-history. I have used all of these terms, but now I use the term "underground history" more and more because it better captures an asymmetrical battle between scattered, often besieged citizens on the one hand, and possessors on the other. overwhelmingly powerful state power.

China's underground historians are also inspired by another belief in traditional culture: Jianghu. The word literally means "rivers and lakes," and it represents the untamed world outside the orthodox legal and commercial systems. In ancient times, these areas were hideouts for bandits, bandits, and outlaws whose survival depended on a strict system of honor. Jianghu means lawlessness and freedom, but it also means blood alliance, brotherhood, and the pursuit of fairness and justice.

Quack historians have been around since the birth of the Republic, but in recent years their role has become increasingly important. For the first fifty years of the Communist rule, they fought alone and on their own. Their articles, works, and books were quickly seized by security agencies and are therefore generally unknown.

But in the past two decades, they have welded together into a nationwide network that has withstood several blows and still survived. With the help of digital technology, such as PDF-formatted magazines and books, downloadable videos, and other innovative ways to evade censorship, they have produced a large number of easily shareable works to combat the Communist Party's whitewashing of history. These techniques and strategies have helped China’s anti-historians fight against government repression. Many of them work silently and alone in the face of oppression. Once large-scale riots against the government occur, they step forward without hesitation, as happened during the COVID-19 lockdown from 2020 to 2022.

Equally important, digital technology helps young people in China rediscover the genealogy of like-minded individuals who collectively trace the prehistory of the Republic. Books that were previously only available in the libraries of foreign research institutions can now be easily shared. Documentaries of the heroic deeds of resistance fighters have been filmed and circulated quietly. Taboo themes such as the massacre of thousands of landowners in the early years of the Republic have also been included in historical novels. Dig. The artwork fills gaps that are evident in the rigorously scrutinized historical archives. In the past, these critical thinkers in China would have felt alone. Now they have a rich collective memory of how the Chinese people stood up against authoritarian rule. This may be more important to them than anything else, because it motivates them to keep going, even in the face of severe blockades and confinements.

What this book records is the rise of China’s underground historical movement in the past twenty years. This movement has become increasingly important after Xi Jinping came to power, and it will inevitably have a profound impact on China’s future.

I studied in China from 1984 to 1985, worked in China as a newspaper reporter from 1994 to 2001, and returned to Beijing from 2008 to 2020, mainly writing long-form reports and books. I interviewed many underground historians, both at home and in the field. I read the books they wrote, watched the movies they made, and tracked their rivalries on social media. I see them having less and less room to move, and generally they just have to endure it, but when demonstrations break out, they quickly move to participate and have an impact on the public movement. I realized that this was not a story of survival, but a legend of active resistance.

I think the most reasonable way is to unfold it from three dimensions: First, from China’s geographical space, we can see that the center of China’s underground historical movement is slowly moving, from the northwest, the cradle of the Chinese revolution, to its cultural center. The arc of spread southward reaches all the way to Hong Kong. and, in recent years, the help of digital platforms and overseas allies.

Matching geographical space is the time dimension: from the past, present to the future. These three eras constitute the three main chapters of the book. The first phase mainly took place in northwest China, with the founding of the Communist Party and its early rule of China. The intensive violence in this phase left deep wounds on the national spirit. The second phase is now - the first decade of Xi Jinping's rule - and how this movement challenges the history of Communist Party control. The third phase is the future. The protests in Hong Kong, the protests of ethnic minorities and the series of protests in response to the new crown lockdown since 2020 all indicate future trends and the potential for political change.

The third dimension, which is also the coordinate system that connects the first two dimensions, is the personal stories and works of these underground historians. Readers will meet many people and hear many people's stories in the book, but two characters appear throughout. One is documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, whom we meet in Chapter 2, who made a film documenting notorious labor camps in northwestern China. Another is journalist Jiang Xue, who tells the story of her family's tragedy and the magazine "Spark" published by some students in 1960 - hence the book's title.

The stories of Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue are intertwined with those of several other important figures in the anti-historical movement, such as filmmaker Hu Jie, underground history magazine publisher Wu Di, and historian Tan Hecheng. Their backgrounds and works are gathered together in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, which describe the Communist Party before Xi's era, how Xi uses history to strengthen his rule, and how digital technology can help China's whistleblowers combat the Party's control of history. distortion and misuse.

Between these main chapters are a dozen short essays on what I call "memory," a concept that comes from the early twentieth century's "memory of place," specifically referring to real places where history reappears and memories resonate—battlefields, battlefields, Museums, execution grounds. In recent decades, new technologies have broadened the concept of "theater memory" to include movies, books, and all kinds of media. Based on this concept, I provide character sketches, site sketches, and introductions to some representative works of counter-memory, which together illustrate the ambition of China’s underground historians: to rewrite modern Chinese history in order to reshape the place they love so much. the future of the country.

Readers may quickly wonder what all this means for China's development trajectory. I will venture some of my own inferences, but before you start reading, let me make two important points.

The first point is that this book introduces readers to characters who live in the interior of China. These people themselves are very valuable and worth getting to know. The scope and ambition of their work rivals that of the great writers and filmmakers of the Cold War - Solzhenitsyn, Kundera and Forman. (Note 1) It is worth reminding that these big figures in Eastern European intellectual circles had very limited influence in their own countries at that time. Until the economies of these countries came to a standstill, ordinary people began to look for other ways to understand the past and reassess their future.

Obviously, China's rapid economic development is a thing of the past, and many young people are coping with their difficult life with a negative attitude. They were talking about how to quit - "lay flat" or "moisten" became popular words.

But this alienation from life can quickly turn into action. The COVID-19 lockdown is a particularly typical example. Many characters in the book, such as Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue, suddenly returned to the public eye after being marginalized for many years. At the beginning of the new year of 2023, Jiang Xue published her most famous article (Note 2), just weeks after a wave of demonstrations sweeping across China persuaded the government to abandon its COVID-19 clearance policy. In the article, she talked about the lockdown and despair, and the young people's desire and call for freedom. Through her extensive reading of Eastern European thought, she gained a thorough understanding of China's rigid political system. This article was reposted repeatedly on Telegram and WeChat. Although it was quickly banned on WeChat, various edited versions continued to circulate.

It is not difficult to reconstruct scenes like these, which push her and others back to the fore, whose long-term research and writing have limited audiences but whose interpretations resonate more with the public than government propaganda. It has become natural for us to explore the history and context of this group of characters.

The second important point is that the lives and works of these people changed the traditional narrative of how China is viewed. I left China in 2020, conducted academic research at an Asian studies institution in Singapore for a year, and then went to work at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In these places, I witnessed firsthand how China is portrayed by our opinion leaders and political dignitaries. The dominant Chinese narrative is that nothing happens there except a series of utopian horrors: tight surveillance, cultural genocide, blind nationalism.

As someone who has lived in China for more than 20 years, and as a reporter who has reported on a large number of religious and political persecutions, I know that these problems are of course real. But conversely, we must also realize that China has other perspectives. The critical voices have not completely disappeared, which raises the question of how to participate in China's affairs, which is one of the conclusions that this book explores.

The long-standing anti-historical movement in China also challenges the assumption that the Communist Party has the ability to completely dominate society. As you will see in this book, the Party is not invincible. Although the odds are against it, people in China can still publish works and make films to fight against the authoritarianism. Their ideas spread, and when social problems reach a breaking point, people turn to them for new ideas for rethinking the country. This is why Xi Jinping uses his own unique policies to control history - because Xi understands that counter-historical narratives are a real and existential threat.

The most important question this book raises is whether forgetfulness ultimately wins. Changes in any society are usually initiated by a small group of outsiders. Sometimes, focus and persistence allow their beliefs to become mainstream voices. The cliché that applies to almost all forms of society at all times is that the "silent majority" does not know the truth and is indifferent. The important thing is that there are still many Chinese people today who do understand the truth and have been fighting to change their country.

This book is not a fairy tale in which good triumphs over evil. Just as China's tight surveillance system has not succeeded, the opponents have not yet won. So I'm going to open this book with a passage from Hannah Arendt about people in the Dark Ages. We are so accustomed to the darkness in China today that a little light dazzles us. Maybe after reading this book, you can come to your own conclusion, whether these people are shining candlelight or blazing sun - or they are both: they are still candlelight today, but they will light up China tomorrow.