Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao, released in 2017, is often cited as one of the best books on modern China. Johnson found a yearning for spiritual belief in a China run by the Communist Party. His new book, Sparks, is just as good. Like Souls, it approaches modern China at an oblique angle, investigating what at first seems insubstantial but by the end feels a significant moral challenge to the party.
Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer, tells the stories of people who feel compelled to record a truth in opposition to the official one. They put the stories on YouTube videos, in scrapbooks and makeshift magazines, similar to what were known as the Eastern Bloc samizdat of the Cold War.
Sparks, which gives the book its name, was one such magazine. It was published by a group of young people exiled after raising concerns during Mao’s brief phase allowing criticism during the doomed “Let one hundred flowers bloom” campaign. They later produced the magazine from a tractor shed trying to warn people about the Great Famine in the late 1950s. It ended badly – they were hunted, imprisoned and executed.
Johnson’s new generation follow in Sparks’ footsteps. They are people like Ai Xiaoming, a documentary film-maker, whose grainy hand-held videos tell stories the party would prefer forgotten – such as the history of a labour camp, Jiabiangou, known in the 1950s as the Ditch, where prisoners starved or turned to cannibalism. She was also present during the Covid outbreak in Wuhan looking after her ageing father. Ai was among a group of bloggers, including the better known diarist Fang Fang, trying to record the truth in opposition to party propaganda.
One of Johnson’s best encounters is with the emotional and engaging Tan Hecheng, a carpenter and writer who feels driven to record what happened in one county where 9000 people were clubbed to death during the Cultural Revolution. He came across a story of the killings in the 1980s and cannot get it out of his head. The reason Chinese know of the killings is Tan’s meticulous 600-page book. Johnson travels the county with an undercover Tan, who is clearly regarded by villagers as part-mad, part-heroic and fully dangerous to know, since officials may see them talking. The chapter of Tan talking to villagers, some who feel it best to forget, others burning to tell their story, is exceptional reportage.
This is the second significant book to deal with the challenges of history and memory in China recently. Sparks shares some of the same tone and structure as Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, one of the Listener’s best books of last year. It is just as compelling. Both books also happen to share a common story, that of Song Binbin, who was famously photographed as a Red Guard tying a red armband for Mao. She may also have initiated one of the first killings of the Cultural Revolution, beating her deputy principal to death, with others.
The books approach her story in different ways. Branigan, concerned with how the Cultural Revolution still haunts China, tries to find out what Song Binbin thinks now and whether she feels culpable. Johnson is there when a group of historians debate how they can get at the truth of what Song Binbin did to preserve it for future generations. For both China’s recent history is a contested place.
Johnson is especially strong when he addresses why these amateur historians feel compelled to record their counter-histories. For some it is getting family history straight. Others feel they need to record the stories of suffering for future historians so the victims are not forgotten. Others feel a moral compulsion, telling Johnson China cannot grow if it doesn’t face the mistakes of the past.
But this duty brings them into conflict with the party and its view of history. Communism by ideology is meant to be the fulfilment of the march to a truly representative form of government. Mao added his own authoritarian streak, writing and rewriting the party history to prove he was right in every ideological argument, a trait which has persisted.
Thus the Communist Party may make mistakes but it can never misrule. Yet it is evidence of party misgovernment and tyranny the historians are recording.
Sparks becomes tauter and more compelling as it becomes obvious that Johnson’s odd gang of amateur historians actually pose a very real ideological challenge to the identity of the party.
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson ($65 hb, also ebook and audiobook)
