Reviewing Sparks (July 2025)

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future was published in 2023, a decade plus into Xi Jinping’s forever leadership. The author is Ian Johnson who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of the international relations journal Foreign Affairs. He is a longtime correspondent who has spent nearly two decades reporting in China for the Baltimore Sun, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In 2001, while reporting for the WSJ, he won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China's persecution of the Falun Gong.

The book title, Sparks, is a link to China’s past underground historians and the short-lived journal, Spark. Like that long defunct journal, the title is intended to evoke the image of sudden and unpredictable moment when “a single spark can start a prairie fire,” illuminating a dark world. Referring to the longstanding effort to keep history intact in the face of official efforts to rewrite the past to align with contemporary Communist Party ideology, he writes,

If the history of this movement has taught us anything, it is that it has grown with time, despite setbacks. We can look at individual battles and see defeat. But we can also see an endless cycle of creation, of new sparks that leap off the flint of history every time it is struck.

For this reviewer, the great value of Johnson’s book is the introduction to a much larger base of Chinese dissent. Up until five years ago, I had not read much in the way of Chinese dissidents. That contrasts sharply with my readings of Soviet and East Bloc dissident authors. In 2021, I set out to find China’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Liao Yiwu was by some called just that, so I read several of his works that had been translated into English.(1) It seems that the literature of political dissent was promoted more vigorously when it came out of Europe. Perhaps it had something to do with the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and maybe there was a cultural bias in favour of things European. Regardless, Johnson’s book is a welcome addition as more writings—including science fiction, which often carries subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) political commentary—from China are becoming available to Anglophones.

While to outsiders, China might appear to be a monolithic society of faceless, brainwashed simpletons, Johnson informs us that there are many who refuse to take the political system as incorrigibly fixed by faraway and mysterious forces. Life is often difficult enough without taking on a virtually omnipotent adversary, especially with the temptations of easy living. There are, of course, those whose mercenary instincts compel them to ‘mind’ others or brutally torture and kill them on behalf of the Party. And then there are those who from an overabundance of zealousness and/or self-righteous are willing to ‘mind’ or torture without charging a fee. Neither the underground historians nor Johnson hide these actors as is made plain in the book. However, there are those who, though rightfully fearful of the consequences, are willing to challenge the Party—the omnipotent adversary of any who cut through the Party’s lies of disremembering. Just why they do so is an important part of the stories that Johnson tells.

For Johnson, history is the battleground where the underground historians challenge the dogma of Party history. According to Johnson, there have been different versions of Party history since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The first he identifies with Mao Zedong, the second with Deng Xiaoping and the third with Xi Jinping. To understand Party history is to better understand official China. Mao’s China is for outsiders the China of failed economic and social policies, most notably land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Deng’s China is regarded as a turn away from China’s fixation on a rapid socialist transformation of society and the economy and towards a more open, productive and free enterprise economy. Xi’s China is a synthesis, an assertion of the Chinese ‘way,’ state capitalism under the control of a single party, the Communist Party.

Where Johnson takes issue with modern China is with the one-party state, and in particular an authoritarian (interestingly, he rarely uses the word totalitarian) party-state that intends to create a conformist society aligned with the principles and values of the Party. For that to happen, the party-state needs to control history, rewriting disasters of the past and embellishing achievements. Writing of Xi’s China, Johnson states that

Since taking power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made control of history a top domestic priority. He has closed scores of unauthorized journals and museums and jailed those who oppose his version of the truth. These acts of disremembering warp the country’s collective memory and have succeeded in convincing most Chinese people that even if the party is flawed, it is doing a good job and its opponents are at best unrealistic, and at worst traitors.

Johnson explains Jinping’s strategy in the context of what Xi considers to be the failure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to control the minds and memories of the people, which ultimately led to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Johnson writes,

The Soviet Union had collapsed because its leaders had allowed alternative versions of history to take root. Later versions of this story, some of them written in books and others told in ominous videos, put the fault much earlier. Instead of Gorbachev being to blame, it was Khrushchev and his de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s that allowed the rot to set in. In this regard, Xi and Mao were similar. Mao, too, perceived the de-Stalinization of the 1950s as a debacle, a dangerous admission of error that should not have been allowed. For China, the last great communist power standing, this mistake would not be repeated.

The underground historians documented in Johnson’s book are threats and thus enemies of Xi and the Party, which explains why for Xi it is so important not to yield to those who would subvert the Party’s authority over China’s history, especially history since the inception of the Party in the 1920s. The punishments for noncompliance are severe—loss of livelihood and even life itself. It is against the backdrop of the battle of the underground historians and the Party that Johnson assembles his cast of characters who are far too many to be mentioned in this brief review. A few examples are briefly mentioned below.

There is Lin Zhao an improbable blend of Christian and communist who refused to recant during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s. She was killed. Then, there is Hu Jie, a filmmaker and artist, whose films resurrect histories of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution and whose drawings and woodblocks reflect a deep influence from Holocaust remembrances. Next is Fang Lizhi, the author of the famous essay, ‘The Chinese Amnesia,’(2) in which he declares that “about once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society. This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of ‘Forgetting History.’”

And there is Huang Zerong, living in internal exile and watched over by Party minders, who responds to Johnson’s question whether the Communist Party's Anti-Rightist campaign of 70 years earlier still matters, as follows,

Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people hadn’t starved to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would not have been Tiananmen.

In other words, yes, accurate history matters because it can, if allowed, contribute to what will happen in the future. Catastrophic historical events cannot be averted if there is no historical reference to their having happened before.

Then, there is Tan Hecheng, who Johnson maintains is solely responsible for the fact that the world knows the truth about Dao County during the Cultural Revolution. Hecheng spent 40 years researching and writing about it and first published his findings in 2011. Johnson presents this graphic summary of Hecheng’s research.

For several weeks in August 1967, more than nine thousand people were murdered in this region. Its epicenter was Dao County, which the Xiao River bisects on its way north toward the Xiang and then the Yangtze. About half the victims were killed in this county of 400,000 people, some clubbed to death and thrown into limestone pits, others tossed into sweet potato cellars to suffocate. Many were tied together in bundles around a charge of quarry explosives. These victims were called “homemade airplanes” because their body parts flew over the fields. But most victims were simply bludgeoned to death with agricultural tools—hoes, carrying poles, and rakes—and then tossed into the waterways that flow into the Xiao.

Prior to reading Liao Yiwu, I had heard about the long-suffering Christians in China. One had to admire their bravery. Though not necessarily regarded as political, they were of course political insofar as they resisted the Party’s control of religion. Sometimes Christian missionaries are dismissed as being little more than the softer side of Western imperialism and that charge may be true in a general sense and in the particulars of some organizations and people. Here, Liao’s book, God Is Red, can be offered in evidence of these peoples’ courage. It is noteworthy that Liao, while sympathetic to the Chinese Christians he interviewed, openly declares himself to be a nonbeliever.

Earlier in this review, the question why these underground historians, as unofficial historians have often done in China’s past, would dare engage in “asymmetrical battle” against “an overwhelmingly strong state.”

They write diaries and articles that attract large audiences. They are shut down. But they return, again and again, just as they and their forebears have for seventy-five years.

There is no easy answer to the question, “Why?” As curator of the work of so many underground historians in China, Johnson can best answer by sharing their voices.

Johnson does offer one intriguing explanation that may lie in the back of the minds of this never-ending stream of dissidents. It is this,

Stopping these people from working requires an inordinate commitment of resources. It is not the same as an operation to close down a magazine. It means deploying scores of agents 24/7 for each person who has to be stopped. . . . But China has thousands of people contributing to this movement. It can’t be done to all of them all the time.

This battle is already exacting a steep toll on the state. Most estimates are that the money spent on China’s domestic intelligence services rivals the national defense budget, with each accounting for 10 percent of government expenditures.

Johnson concludes this argument by observing a resemblance between the “unstoppable juggernaut” of the Chinese state and the once-thought indomitable Stasi security apparatus of East Germany.

_____

Endnotes

It is not a definitive history of Tiananmen but something more compelling: intimate interviews with people who fought for the revolution, were jailed, and were then released to a country that had suddenly turned away from politics and embraced the deadening pleasures of consumer society and the cheap thrills of nationalism.