By Kurt Johnson
POLITICS
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future
Ian Johnson
Allen Lane, $55
In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. My final stop was a visit to Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. A long stream of mourners filed through to view the Great Helmsman, wrapped in the hammer and sickle.
Many lay yellow roses, which, lest the pile tip and threaten the scene’s solemnity, were hastily gathered by white-gloved guards and presumably resold out front. Some were visibly or perhaps performatively affected, weeping before emerging blinking into the smog of Tiananmen Square. While the waxen Mao was clearly dead, he continues to define the bounds of Chinese society and politics, haunting on a national scale.
People queue in front of revolutionary statues as they wait to get into Mao Zedong’s mausoleum.Credit: Getty
In Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson refutes the Western assumption that the grieving I observed represents a one-China history: monolithic, top down with absolute obeisance to the official version. Johnson has assembled a compelling collection of writers, poets and documentary filmmakers that represent an underground historical movement; empowered by technology, they represent a genuine challenge to the party that itself taps into a long tradition.
The title Sparks is particularly evocative. Named after Sparks, an underground 1960 journal written by students politically exiled to a rural backwater. They believed they could provoke change by revealing the corruption, hypocrisy and immense humanitarian cost of Mao’s policies.
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In authentic samizdat style, the first edition was printed on a mimeograph machine in a sulphuric acid plant. Two members of the clique pretended to be cultivating bacteria for the plant, sealed themselves in a room away from any nosy informants to hand carve the rolls for printing. The result was eight pages of incendiary essays attacking Communist leadership for gorging themselves while the country starved, comparing Mao’s cult of personality to Nazi worship.
The clique was eventually exposed, members imprisoned, the leaders executed. Sparks may have vanished without a trace, but copies were kept by the state, that were scanned and shared among intellectuals. Despite an initial run of only 30, the publication remains a beacon for historians and journalists.
China is ruled by what Johnson calls “documentary politics” in which history is rigidly hierarchical, communicated through resolutions. These rare documents have extraordinary implications, issued only thrice in the past: by Mao, Deng Xiaoping and finally by Xi, they define history in epic hagiographic strokes, framing the party’s new direction and their predecessor’s legacy.
Deng’s resolution after Mao’s death is particularly instructive. Squandering the chance to make peace with Mao’s disastrous policies, such as the Great Famine that cost 45 million lives, the insipid document mentions only “serious losses to our country and people”.
Unlike the grand arcs and unfurling banners of official history, the underground of Johnson’s work consists of committed loners or marginalised cabals that meticulously build evidence, usually from firsthand interviews or official documents glimpsed in more open periods. These historians or journalists are driven by a powerful and literary humanity, often hoping to rejoin with a pre-communist past, in either China or in the occupied fringes such as Tibet.
Consider Tan Hecheng, a devout historian who gathers evidence around Dao county where in August 1967, 9000 people were murdered in a brutal chapter of Red Guard terror. In the aftermath, the massacre has been papered over. Too many party officials have blood on their hands for any kind of broad reckoning. Hecheng has assembled one million words of interviews and documents about the event. His subversive act is refusing to forget.
Sometimes these histories do break through into the national discussion. Like an apology issued by Song Binbin for her part in the torture and killing of school principal Bian Zhongyun at the height of the Red August terror. While the reception was ambivalent, the apology stirred conversation in China about personal and collective responsibility for the Cultural Revolution’s excesses.
The image of Mao looms in Tiananmen Square.Credit:
As in the Soviet Union, apparatchiks are a class unto themselves, inheriting wealth and power with the party machinery at their disposal. Personal responsibility for history’s wrongs is a threat to the pillar on which their power rests.
Technology has connected pockets of underground historians into a bona fide network. Where once publications were turned out by hand, they can now be shared inside China and beyond via VPNs. Samizdat has expanded to include blogs and documentary films, which have developed their own shaky aesthetic called jishi pian – or recording reality – a reaction to the smooth, over-produced official histories.
Johnson finishes with COVID, a moment when anger over the Draconian Chinese lockdown threatened to spill over into unrest. These underground networks provided channels to express discontent. As in the USSR, it is impossible to gauge the true strength of China until the cracks begin to appear. What is certain is that the courageous work of China’s underground historians and of Johnson to bring them to our attention, depends on a common humanity that will always pose a threat to the authoritarian.
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