The self-published mimeographed magazine that gives Ian Johnson’s journalistic book Sparks[1] its title takes its own name from a highly subversive idiom: 星火燎原 “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” The eponymous ”Spark” was a journal published in China in the aftermath of the great famine about things its writers experienced firsthand: the rampant cannibalism, the destruction of the countryside, the wave of deaths by starvation. Publishing these eyewitness accounts led to the detention and death of every single person who was involved with it, but these scant works found a second life years later when copies were rediscovered – each copy of this handmade journal had been meticulously collected and saved by party officials as evidence. What they determined to destroy as dangerous counter-revolutionary propaganda and what likely would have disappeared on its own (as poorly bound, poorly copied works of a momentary nature typically do) instead gained renewed life. This is the main story that inspired this book, also titled Sparks.
The book offers a literature review that makes a single point: dissident DIY literature and historical writing in China has a long illustrious tradition stretching back to Sima Qian and Su Dongpo, who wrote against the empires that castrated and exiled them. In grand Confucian style, intellectuals who spoke out against imperial excess were rewarded with death and immortality. Even from the extreme infancy of China’s Communist Party, discontents were already publishing samizdat criticizing it. That’s practically tradition, and it just can’t be stamped out. The author, Ian Johnson, who spent more than a decade in China as a journalist before being expelled along with other foreign journalists during the coronavirus pandemic, traces these efforts through the ages, but primarily from the 1950s to the present. The works he focuses on are not mere criticism of party ideology, corruption, or policy, but they are individual efforts at writing sweeping historical narratives that capture the details of major events in China’s history that go against the grain of party propaganda.
Still from the film "The Ditch" or 夹边沟 Jiabiangou
The author attempts to give readers the tools to finally lay to rest the question, "But who is China’s Solzhenitsyn and where is China’s Gulag Archipelago?” Sparks gives us ammunition to answer with examples such as these: Ai Xiaoming’s documentary Jiabiangou Elegy about the labor camp there, Lin Zhao’s blood letters written in prison, and Gao Hua’s text How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, among others. In addition to summarizing each of these efforts in Sparks, Johnson also provides translations of some of the works he references on the website “The China Unofficial Archive” https://minjian-danganguan.org so that these efforts are accessible to the broader English reading public.[2] All the works that are referenced in Sparks can be found there as well as many more that were too numerous to mention in the book.[3]
Sparks reveals that there are plenty of Solzhenitsyn-types living and working in and out of China today. However, the linguistic and cultural barrier has been far higher and harder to scale than that between the US and Russia. While the Cold War also led to a flowering of Russian émigré art and culture in the US, the Chinese-US trade war has not yet led to the same appreciation for the Chinese culture brought abroad with China’s exiles, dissidents, and economic migrants. Instead, everything Chinese has been viewed with suspicion, as we have been continuously throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sparks does the admirable work of correcting this error in an extremely accessible style.
I found this book personally touching because each of the subjects, the underground historians, use self-publishing to advance their own version of events, and they largely work outside of the mainstream by necessity (although some of the subjects are establishment intellectuals who have managed to get away with being critical of poor governmental responses to crises due to their reputation or perhaps dumb luck). They hold the same conviction that all samizdat, zine makers, and scribblers hold: no matter the circulation, no matter who is listening, I am going to tell it like it is!
It’s impossible not to be inspired by all that these independent and semi-independent scholars accomplished and their devotion to their cause no matter how far their influence actually stretched. The fact that their work could be destroyed, and their names could be completely discredited did not dismay the figures described in the book. The transparency and honesty of Ai Xiaoming who described that it was her brother’s unbelievable financial success and support that allowed her to devote herself to her work somehow feels bold and fresh. Gao Hua made his living as a professor in a university, a firm establishment intellectual, while funding his own work of history, which he paid for with his untimely death soon after (he had ruined his health from cigarettes mostly, but that massive book certainly didn’t help). No one in Sparks hides their resources or the source of their funding. For any scholar who purports to reveal the truth, full transparency regarding how you are able to devote yourself to the search for truth is a necessary level of integrity that is typically sorely lacking among intellectuals.
For independent historians and writers, disclosing and describing the material cost of producing their work is definitive. How otherwise could one claim independence? As China grew richer in places, the blossoming of an independent bourgeois intelligentsia, typically a given in prosperous societies, has been constrained, but not so constrained as to prevent it entirely. While some prominent Russian dissidents are household names in the US, Chinese dissidents are less well known, and as they spend time in exile from their dynamic homeland, they lose touch with the people’s actual concerns. Sparks introduces us to this world so that these names and works can become familiar, and a lazy dismissal of Chinese intellectual activity post-Communism as entirely false and compromised becomes an untenable position.
[1] Johnson, Ian. (2023). Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. New York: Oxford University Press.
[2] Reading the China Dream is also an excellent resource for this.
[3] If you are interested in providing English translations, they are looking for that as well.
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