“Some see in his critique of the Mao era parallels to today: the arbitrary rule of an aging leader, harsh treatment of dissent, and government programs that encourage people to inform on one another.” My profile of the octogenarian essayist Gao Ertai, who lived for years in the deserts of western China and now resides in Las Vegas.

Read the article  in The New Yorker online here.

Read the Chinese translation in the Boston Review of Books (波斯頓書評) here.

For the past three years I’ve been a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where I finished my book Sparks on dissent in today’s China, while also working on policy issues. It’s been a great experience: I got the chance to work with collegial, interesting thinkers; I moved back to the United States for the first sustained period of time in nearly 30 years; and our family had stability after I was turfed out of China in 2020 and we faced the uncertainties of the Covid era.  For these and many other reasons I’ll always be thankful to the Council for providing me with an intellectual home and a great place to work. 

We would have enjoyed staying on at the Council and in New York but a variety of reasons call us back to Europe and so–to bury the lede–we are leaving New York on July 1 for Berlin (via a summer in Southeast Asia).

Why? Emotionally, I love New York but I have felt what the Chinese call yuanfen (affinity) with Berlin ever since I went there before the Wall fell. After leaving Montreal as a teenager, I didn’t feel at home in many places but Berlin–as messed up as it was and is–immediately felt like home. I spent more than a decade there and it was my base for all the years I spent in China. 

Now we have a great chance to return to Berlin. I’ll be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. This is modeled on (and in fact its official English name is) the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Princeton-based center for natural and social scientists. I’ll work on my next book there, on religious life in Xi’s China–hint, it has to do with folk religion, pilgrimages, and stick fighting.

Meanwhile, while my wife Sim Chi Yin can be a bit closer to her artistic practice–she’s represented by a gallery there and often works in Europe’s colonial archives. 

In fact, we aren’t flying straight to Berlin because she has a performance in Singapore at the end of August. It’s a one-woman show where she uses her photos, videos, and storytelling to look at memory and forgetting. The show premieres at the national theater, the Esplanade on Aug. 30 . (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention TICKETS.)

So we’ll go in July, spend some time in Penang, and then she has rehearsals for most of the month. Then in early September off to Berlin for a new chapter in our lives.

We’re building out a tour this September, October, and November to talk about my new book  Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.

I’ll start out on the launch date, Sept. 26, at McNally Jackson in New York City, followed the next day with a talk at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA. Then back to NY for a Council on Foreign Relations talk, down to Washington DC for talks at Georgetown and Politics & Prose, followed by a trip to the U.K., and then the West Coast of the United States.

Next year: the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Seattle (where I’ve organized a panel on counter-history in China), Stanford, SMU in Dallas, and more… For some of the details, please visit my Sparks-tour page here. 

Coming 26 September 2023: Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future–my first book in six years, a chronicle of Chinese people inside China today who are challenging the Communist Party on its most sensitive topic, its control of history. 

Summary

From the back cover:

A documentary filmmaker who spent years uncovering a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through draconian Covid lockdowns; a samizdat magazine publisher who dodges the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China’s most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground–its monopoly on history. 

Why 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. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism’s triumph. The Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its continued hold on power. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping’s signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party’s very survival.

But in recent years, critical thinkers from across China have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China’s ubiquitous surveillance state, their samizdat journals, underground films, and guerilla media posts document a persistent pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present.

Based on ten years of on-the-ground investigations and interviews, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a land engaged in of one of humanity’s great struggles of memory against forgetting–a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

Advance Praise

    For more than three decades, Ian Johnson has conducted some of the most important grassroots research of any foreign journalist in China. With Sparks, he turns his attention to history—not the sanctioned, censored, and selective history promoted by the Communist Party, but the independent histories that are being written and filmed by brave individuals across the country. This book is a powerful reminder of how China’s future depends on who controls the past.

            —Peter Hessler, MacArthur grantee, National Book Award Winning author of Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and Strange Stones.      

   An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read, Ian Johnson’s Sparks is alive with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably, refuse to let their histories be forgotten. It’s a privilege to read books like these. 

          —Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers, and Wall Street Journal national correspondent.

     China’s most famous modern writer Lu Xun predicted that “as long as there shall be stones, the seeds of fire will not die.” In Sparks Ian Johnson introduces us to a new generation of unofficial historians — modern-day “seeds of fire.” Their work will survive the Xi Jinping era, both to shed light on the past and to illuminate China’s better future.

          — Geremie R. Barmé, editor, China Heritage.

     Ian Johnson’s Sparks was a revelation: this historian from overseas spent years penetrating the world of underground Chinese historians, becoming in his own right a recorder of pioneers such as Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Jiang Xue, who use text and video to record China’s lost history.

            —Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker, God is Red, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, and recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

     Sparks tells the stories of underground historians who are determined to write down China’s hidden histories of famines, political campaigns, massacres, and virus outbreaks. These stories show why Xi Jinping wants to control history–because memories like these are sparks of light in a heavy darkness.

            —Li Yuan, New York Times columnist and host of the Bumingbai podcast.

     In the long years of Chinese people’s pursuit of justice and equality, preserving historical truth has always been a fierce but invisible battle. As Ian Johnson’s Sparks shows, today’s fighters for the truth are backed by vast armies—the seen and unseen, the living and the dead—who together are prying open the lies on which totalitarianism is built.

          —Cui Weiping, Beijing Film Academy professor, translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese.

        Ian Johnson has presented a powerful narrative of how the human spirit has survived the cruel repression of Maoist totalitarianism and is still doing the same against Xi Jinping’s determined efforts to impose a new form of digital totalitarianism. In telling the individual stories of Chinese citizens who choose to defend freedom and dignity, Johnson has also provided a powerful illustration of how Xi’s repressive regime works.  A must read for anyone interested in the Chinese and China.

            —Steve Tsang, historian of Hong Kong, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

   This is a necessary book charged with historical urgency. The sparks, left by the eponymous underground magazine suppressed in the 1950s, are preserved here and ready to burst into a  firestorm.”

            —Ha Jin, author of the National Book Award-winning novel Waiting

     This compelling and highly enjoyable book will greatly enhance the general reader’s understanding of the subtle counter-currents of resistance at work in Chinese society below the smooth surface of control and compliance. In fifteen chapters and a conclusion, the author provides a comprehensive and detailed picture of what he calls “underground history” and its practitioners in mainland China—amateur or one might say guerilla historians who devote considerable efforts to reconstructing the past through independent inquiry, bypassing and challenging state-condoned narratives of the past.

        —Sebastian Veg, author of Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals, professor of history at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris. 

Publication Rights and Editions

This book will come out in the United States and Canada via Oxford University Press, and via Penguin (Allen Lane) for other English-language rights areas, including the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Asia. 

Foreign rights have also been sold for Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

Some notes on the covers

The US and Canada cover (at the top of this post) was made by Yang Kim, a Brooklyn-based book designer who works for Crown (Random House). She used a collage of images inside a torch, which she took from an image used in a 1960 student journal, Spark, which was the inspiration for my book title. Thanks Yang for such a brilliant job!

The designers for Allen Lane in London opted to use an Ai Weiwei papercut called “River Crabs.” Ai uses the traditional art form of paper cutting and combines it with topical issues, such as pollution, protests, and the state’s demolition of private property. River Crabs are a form of Internet slang for censorship and protests against it.

Photos

The book contains more than thirty photos. Some of them are historical, such as images of the students who founded the original journal. Many of these people ended up in labor camps for years and some were executed. Thanks to several Chinese historians, such as Song Yongyi and the documentary filmmaker Hu Jie for sending me these valuable historical prints. These images survived the maelstrom and thanks to digital technologies are now part of China’s collective memory–a key theme of this book.

Others photos in the book were taken by the Singaporean artist and former Magnum photographer Sim Chi Yin, who accompanied me on some of the interviews. Chi Yin did beautiful landscapes that caught the theme of repressed and recovered memories that lie at the heart of this book. 

Chi Yin also took portraits of key people involved in the piece, especially the journalist Jiang Xue and the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. 

The book also contains reproductions of artworks that try to counter the “tyranny of the archive”–that reality is more than state-controlled archives can ever show us. 

Maps

Once again I was fortunate enough to work with the mapmaker Angela Hessler, who put together the beautiful map that you can see below, which reflects a key theme in the book–the landscape of memory. The logo of the magazine Spark is reproduced in the lower left-hand corner, while the logo of the contemporary journal Remembrance is in the lower right. The little torches indicate key locations mentioned in the book. Thanks Angela!

Purchase

Last but not least….the book is available now for preorder from OUP, Penguin, Amazon, Barnes, and any indy bookstore that you frequent.

I’d appreciate any pre-orders as it helps improve how the book is marketed, both in the bookstore and online. And afterwards, any reviews or feedback to the bookseller would be great–it helps keep the book in stock and in print. 

How I got to know Wang Yi, the jailed pastor of Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church. This article in Christianity Today (简体字 / 正體字）is an introduction I wrote to a collection of his theological writings, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, which has recently been published in the United States.

His thoughts go far beyond the specifics of China, raising universal questions about how religions and governments act. But they also illuminate the party’s new stricter policies on religions, and explain why he chose to go to jail for his belief.

Spending time with Wang Yi (which I describe in detail in The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao) was a privilege, and it still sickens me to think of him in jail, far from his wife and son. I can only hope that he makes it through to the other side and is reunited with them.

Thanks to Christianity Today for reprinting this introduction, and Hannah Nation and others for their editing of his writings

How a Cornell University professor became a leading voice calling for a more constructive policy toward China. A profile for The New Yorker. 

In this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, I give my quick take on the recently concluded party congress, questioning whether Xi is really as powerful as people make him out to be, or if his omnipresence is a sign of looming weakness. 

One of my favorite parts of working for the Council on Foreign Relations is writing “In Briefs,” which are Q&A-style explainers of a current event. They’re aimed at anyone from high school students facing a term paper to people who’ve been in the field for a long time but weren’t quite sure about a particular topic. 

In this one just published on the cfr.org website, I delve into the tricky issue of what is China’s upcoming party congress, and why it matters. On one level it’s easy to explain: party congresses take place every five years, and at every other congress China gets a new leader. They’re where we find out who will run China for the next five years. But this sort of “explainer” article is actually challenging because one question leads to another and another. Where to begin? When did China start changing leaders every decade? And why has Xi decided to be different? And what position is Xi getting at the congress anyway? Is it a third term as president?

The answer to that one is NO! One key misperception I wanted to lay to rest is the idea that Xi’s most important title is “president.” It’s not–it’s like if Joe Biden were chairman of the Delaware Country Club and so we called him Chairman Biden. That would be ridiculous because that title is an honorary position with no real power. What matters is that Biden is president. So, too, in the Chinese  system is it basically irrelevant that Xi is president. The title “president” just means that Xi is head of state and so he gets a 21-gun salute whenever he goes abroad. That’s it. 

Instead what matters is Xi head of the party: run the party and you run China. And it’s at the forthcoming congress that he gets his third term as general secretary of the party. He also gets his second-most important title: chairman of the Central Military Commission, which essentially means he controls the military. (He gets his third term as president next spring but who cares unless you’re in the gun-saluting business!)

So please read on here. It’s free and it’s part of our public education service at CFR.