Sparks: Writing China's Unofficial History

FAIN: FZ-272347-20

Ian Denis Johnson
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Research and writing leading to a book on how dissident writers, filmmakers, academics, and others in China work to document events suppressed in the official national history promoted by the Chinese Communist Party.

In China, few issues are as sensitive as history, which the Communist Party sees as the basis of its legitimacy--history, in its telling, chose it to lead China, resulting in today's rising superpower. But a group of persistent skeptics--professors, writers, and filmmakers--challenge this, much as groups like Memorial in the Soviet Union helped dig up the past and undermine one-party rule. In China, they document massacres, famines, and labor camps, using digital technologies to make documentary films, books, and samizdat magazines. Over the past decade, the Party has ushered in tight political control. And yet a core group inside China keeps at it, convinced it is their duty to document their country's history, and that one day—even if far off in the future--they will spark an awakening. Using carefully documented interviews and observations drawn from years of field work, I will use techniques of narrative non-fiction to show them evade police and censors to keep the past alive.

Associated Products

Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards (Article)
Title: Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards
Author: Ian Johnson
Abstract: In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou Hospital No. 8 in Wuhan. Dressed in an all-white infectious disease suit, the only equipment he carried was a small box of acupuncture needles.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/04/traditional-chinese-medicine-covid-wards/
Format: Other
Publisher: The New York Review

FORBIDDEN CITY: THE BOOK (Book)
Title: FORBIDDEN CITY: THE BOOK
Author: Ian Johnson
Abstract: FORBIDDEN CITY: THE BOOK Newly published: a new photobook on the Forbidden City that I helped put together with the publisher Assouline. I wrote a 4,000-word introduction, in which I talk about how the Forbidden City has returned to the center of Chinese culture. In the past it was the epicenter of the Chinese political and spiritual world; now it is a centerpiece of government efforts to revive traditional culture as part of a political project to increase legitimacy. I focus my essay on Wang Jun, a former reporter and historian of Beijing. His book City Record (城記, which I reviewed for the NYRB in 2011) is a landmark in efforts to preserve the old city and he now works as a researcher for the Palace Museum.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://ian-johnson.com/forbidden-city-the-book/
Publisher: Assouline
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

FORBIDDEN CITY: THE BOOK (Book)
Title: FORBIDDEN CITY: THE BOOK
Author: Ian Denis Johnson
Year: 2021
Publisher: Assouline
Type: Single author monograph

Sparks Chinas Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (Book)
Title: Sparks Chinas Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future
Author: Ian Johnson
Abstract: Sparks: 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 ground: 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 disasters: 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.
Year: 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780197575505
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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