This is the first in-depth interview I’ve given on the China Unofficial Archives, the online non-profit that I set up in 2023 to promote independent Chinese writing and films. The interview is by Hsiaofan Su of the 田間 Tian Jian newsletter. You can read it here: 

The interview is in Chinese, but I’ve machine-translated the interview and paste it below for non-Chinese readers:

[Exclusive Interview]

Ian Johnson, Founder of China Unofficial Archives

“This is a unique database of independent thinkers in China, and we hope it will give people a glimpse into the breadth and depth of this anti-history movement.”

HsiaoFan Su
Jun 03, 2025

History needs to be passed on. Only through constant recollection, narration and preservation can people see the present through past experiences. The China Unofficial Archives was established for this purpose. The homepage of the website reads in large letters: “We are committed to collecting, preserving and disseminating the censored and suppressed Chinese folk history.”

The China Unofficial Archives was established at the end of 2023. The opportunity for its establishment came from the book ” Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future” (hereafter referred to as “Sparks”) published by its founder Ian Johnson in the same year. This book tells the story of “Chinese folk historians” such as journalist Jiang Xue, documentary director Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, who excavate and defend folk historical materials that challenge official narratives.

However, these archives are scattered, and most people, especially Chinese, have difficulty accessing these important historical materials. This gave Zhang Yan the idea of ​​building a website. In order to let more people know about the Chinese Unofficial Archives and use the resources on the website, in early 2025, the Chinese Unofficial Archives website was optimized and began to operate e-newsletters and social media.

Zhang Yan believes that China is part of the global dialogue on “how to face the past”, and Taiwan is included in it, so the significance of China’s private archives to Taiwan is self-evident.

Zhang Yan is a well-known journalist focusing on China. He has lived in China for more than 20 years and has worked for The Baltimore Sun, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and The New York Times (NYT) in the United States.

Tian Jian (hereinafter referred to as Tian): Why was the Chinese Unofficial Archives established?

Zhang Yan (hereinafter referred to as Zhang): About five years ago, I gave a speech for the book I was writing, Spark: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. The audience asked me, where can I find these publications and films? Some of them can be found on the Internet, but they are scattered and lack professional organization. They cannot be searched or categorized by labels, so it is not easy to find or summarize them into a systematic database, and most of them can only be found in large research libraries. For most people, especially Chinese, it is difficult to access these materials.

At first, I naively thought that it would be easy to put these articles, books, and movies on the website, but when I actually started to build the website, I realized the complexity of this project! I found that there was so much information that I needed a search function to facilitate users to search by era, theme, content type, and creator. I also noticed that there were many gaps, such as a lack of information on ethnic minorities and more contemporary issues.

So I officially established this database in 2023 and made it a non-profit organization. We then received funding to build a website and hire people to manage and curate it. I participated in the project for free, as a reward for the people I wrote about in my book, who have written about China for decades, and I hope to do something practical to make the voices of the Chinese people heard. We also have a public welfare board of directors. The rest of the staff are all paid.

Tian: What are the main archival materials in China’s private archives?

Zhang: We started by focusing on the major crises of the 20th century, the Anti-Rightist Movement/Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. We spoke to experts and scholars in these fields and learned about classic books, magazines, and films on these topics. We then expanded our focus to the 21st century, especially the rights protection movement, the social response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the White Paper Movement.

Our goal is to make works that are out of print or unavailable. We do not upload works that are still available for purchase. For example, we included Yang Jisheng’s classic book on the Great Famine, Tombstone , because the English version of this book is still available on the market, and the Chinese version is out of print, so the website only provides the Chinese PDF version because we do not want to affect Mr. Yang’s right to receive royalties from his work.

For me, as a freelance writer, this has always been something I understand: people should be able to earn income from their work. We publish out-of-print and banned books, mostly from publishers that no longer exist; we also publish some important articles and blog posts, especially those that are banned; and we also have hundreds of underground publications, such as Memory .

The materials in China’s Unofficial Archives cover the Anti-Rightist Movement/Great Leap Forward in the 20th century and the White Paper Movement in the 21st century. (Photo taken from the website of China’s Unofficial Archives)
Tian: Can you briefly introduce the team’s work flow?

Zhang: We have a weekly conference call to discuss the priorities for the next week. We use Google Workspace to work and write, and then put it in a shared folder, which is assigned to specific editors. I review the English content, and I usually confirm it as soon as possible, but sometimes (like now!) there will be a backlog of manuscripts. When everything is ready, we upload the content to the website, and update a new project about every day. A new project refers to a book, an article or a movie, with a bilingual introduction in Chinese and English.

Tian: What new features has the China Private Archives website recently launched?

Zhang: We upgraded the website in February and migrated the platform to Omeka S, an open source database software that is often used by universities to display book collections or art exhibitions. The advantage of Omeka S is that it has a map function, which increases the interactivity of the website. Users can zoom in to see which works we have included in different regions of China. Then click on the link to enter the book or movie page related to the region. It also allows people to see that China’s anti-history is not the work of a few intellectuals in Beijing or a few other big cities. On the contrary, it is a national movement, with memorial spaces, writers, directors, films and books all over the country participating.

We have added a new “Creators” database to highlight these people. On the old website, you clicked on the name of a creator or director, and a bubble window would appear on the screen with a brief introduction of the creator. But now, it will open a new page with a photo of the creator, a more detailed biography, and a list of his works. We think this is a unique database of independent thinkers in China, and we hope that it will give people a glimpse of the breadth and depth of this anti-history movement.

The third new feature is the addition of an e-newsletter . We hope to show readers through the e-newsletter how the books, magazines and films in the database can dialogue with today’s issues, and how these brave writers and directors in the past are still inspiring and valuable to young people today. The e-newsletter can be subscribed for free through Substack, or read directly on our website. Because we are a non-profit organization, we welcome donations of any form, but all content is free to subscribe.

We are currently fixing some bugs and will further add data visualization features. Our goal remains the same: to attract more people to this database.

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Tian: Can you further explain how new features such as data visualization will be applied in the future?

Zhang: I think the archive is like a public library, with many valuable collections, but if people don’t know about the library, they won’t come in. The library holds book clubs, workshops, and even more relaxed fashion shows or cocktail parties to attract readers. We don’t hold fashion shows or parties, but we have started sending out e-newsletters to let more people know about what we are doing, and visualizing the materials is another way.

Right now, we have basic map functionality, but in the future, we can do more complex things, such as telling stories with data visualizations. We can start with a person and describe their life, and then as you scroll down, you can see maps, photos, books, and links to other people related to or influenced by this person, leading users to explore other regions and more publications. This feature is currently being used by some large news media organizations such as The New York Times, but as software costs come down, we will have the opportunity to do this. This digital content can also be made into a PDF booklet and provided to users for free download, which will also help promote this content. We expect to launch this new feature in the fall and are preparing to start developing it.

This database is a testament to the extraordinary courage and creativity of many Chinese people who, under the pressure of a powerful state apparatus, have time and again successfully written groundbreaking works about (breakthrough) Chinese history from the 1950s to the 2020s.

Tian: What do you think a “good archive” should do?

Zhang: Projects like ours are inherently endless, but our most important goal is to make it a practical research tool. We want to be as inclusive as possible, so we are also filling in some neglected areas, such as Hong Kong or some recent events.

No library could possibly contain everything, but we hope there will be enough content for people to start their research here.

Tian: You have also started to actively operate social media platforms. Is this to communicate with more people, especially young people who have not experienced the history of the Civil War and the June 4th Movement?

Zhang: That’s our goal—to let people know what we have and encourage them to visit the website often. We update the content every few days and put it in the “Latest Collection” column on the homepage. We also have an e-newsletter and even published a physical book, which is Xiang Chengjian’s autobiography, “Returning from Purgatory: Memories of a Survivor of the “Spark” Case during the Great Famine . ”

Tian: The Chinese People’s Archives was established in the hope of allowing “Chinese people to tell China’s stories”. I’m curious about the role of young Chinese people in this?

Zhang: Except for me (I am not Chinese and not young!), all other staff are Chinese, and several of them are around 30 years old. Although this is just a personal observation and not representative, whenever I give a speech about Spark or related topics, young Chinese people are very interested in this database. We also have many volunteers or interns who have joined, and the feedback we get is very touching.

I think this database is popular for many different reasons. I hope it is mainly because it is useful, of course, but also because it overturns the mainstream view in many countries today: that Xi Jinping and the CCP have completely stifled all independent thinking. Anyone who knows China knows that this is wrong. This database proves this, for example, the creator database shows how many Chinese people have successfully written groundbreaking works about (breaking) Chinese history from the 1950s to the 2020s under the pressure of the powerful state machine, showing extraordinary courage and creativity.

We often think that the great historians and journalists who study China are concentrated in the West, such as Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals on the Cultural Revolution, Frank Dikötter on the Great Famine, and Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on the June 4th Incident in the New York Times. Of course, these people are very great, but too many people don’t know that there are actually many Chinese who have made outstanding contributions in these fields. Our database is to highlight these people’s efforts, which will make many young people proud.

Tian: Do you think the Chinese People’s Archives has any significance for Taiwan?

Zhang: No matter how Taiwanese view China, whether they consider themselves Chinese politically, culturally, or not, China is still Taiwan’s largest neighbor, largest trading partner, and is ruled by a regime that wants to take over Taiwan. If that alone is not enough to understand China’s motivation, then what is?

In Sparks, I also tried to show that the Chinese are part of the global conversation about how to face the past—and Taiwan is part of it. When the book was translated into Chinese and published by Taiwan’s Gūsa Publishing House, they translated the word “underground” in the title as “地下” (underground). I said that this was too straightforward and that “民間” (unofficial or folk) would be more appropriate, because many of the interviewees in the book were not “underground” people who had to hide from the police.

But the editor told me that the word “underground” can resonate with Taiwanese readers, “because during the era of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, Taiwan has a long history of underground publications, such as Chen Yingzhen’s “Human World” magazine.” This made me realize that our destinies as human beings are actually connected, and this alone is worthy of the attention of Taiwanese people.

Tian: What do you think is the most difficult or challenging thing in the operation of the China People’s Archives so far?

Zhang : It’s mainly about time. I’m doing this for free, and it takes a lot of time. We’ve also been thinking about new narrative methods to attract more people to access and use this database. I’d like to quote the Chinese documentary director Hu Jie, who said this in a 2015 interview , which still deeply inspires me:

In that most difficult, violent and terrifying era, there were still people in China who were thinking, and some were not afraid of being beheaded. But they were executed in secret, and we, the descendants, do not know how bravely and generously they died. So there is a moral issue here, because they died for us, and if we do not understand, then this is a tragedy.

Tian: Is there any story that particularly impressed you?

Zhang : This is a funny but thought-provoking story. We have received a lot of feedback from China, and some people are reading these books or magazines for the first time. We are particularly proud of our first physical book: Souls Returned from Purgatory: Memories of the Survivors of the “Spark” Case during the Great Famine, written by Mr. Xiang Chengjian, a survivor of the Jiabiangou labor camp.

“Returning from Purgatory: Memories of Survivors of the “Spark” Case during the Great Famine” is the first physical publication of the China Unofficial Archives. (Photo taken from the China Unofficial Archives)
He couldn’t find a publisher willing to help him publish it, so we proposed to put the book in PDF format on the website for free download. He agreed, but he asked me: What if one day (or sooner or later) your website no longer exists? I told him that we will exist for a long time! But he then asked: “Are you sure you will still exist in 50 years? What about 100 years?” I had to honestly say that I didn’t know. Technology is advancing, and people will die one day, and many things may disappear.

For example, I recently visited the website of the documentary “Morning Sun” , a film about young people during the Cultural Revolution. The official website once included interviews with Song Binbin and many other interviewees , but those videos were played with Adobe Flash Player, and most browsers no longer support the player. So now you can only see the photos and an introduction of these interviewees, and you can’t watch the interview content. Although it can be repaired technically, this example clearly shows that too many stories and materials are disappearing.

So I understood Mr. Xiang’s concerns, and I told him, let’s do this, we will find a regular printing house to print your book, attach an ISBN number, and then send it to major research libraries around the world, so that it can be passed down with our civilization forever, and we will also put it on the website so that more people can search and read it. He agreed, so now it is a physical book, and we sent it to nearly 100 libraries around the world, including Harvard University, Stanford University, the British Library, and the Berlin National Library, etc., and included it in the collection catalog.

This experience is of great significance. It reminds us that when doing online work, we should never assume that everything will last forever. Of course, the birth and disappearance of things is a natural cycle, but we must work hard to find ways to ensure that the efforts of one generation can be passed on to the next generation. This is exactly the original intention of the Chinese Unofficial Archives.

Tian: What other archives do you recommend?

Zhang : Our website has a section called “Other Resources” . I would like to recommend one of the websites in particular: Internet Archive , also known as the “Wayback Machine”, is a non-profit organization that automatically backs up billions of URLs every day.

It has an invaluable tool for people who care about China: a browser extension that lets you manually save web pages. If you’ve ever read a great article on WeChat, only to find it “404” and can’t be found, this extension can solve that problem. When you’re reading the article on your computer, click the extension and it will save a full copy of the page, including all the links.

I’m surprised that many scholars don’t pay attention to this and often cite links to web pages that have not been saved. After a few months or years, half of the links in their references are broken! The Internet Archive can prevent this from happening. For example, all the links I cited in the book “Spark” are archived URLs that will work in the future.

I hope that every reader who reads this will install this extension on their browser and save the web links you think are important. This is a way to save history. Here are the extension links for several major browsers: Chrome , Firefox , Safari .

(see original article for links to those extensions.)

ends

In this concise interview, Filip Noubel of the news service Global Voices, interviews me about the evolution of the China Unofficial Archives and our efforts to create a platform for independent Chinese Voices. 

As I mention to Noubel, “Our users are primarily Chinese or overseas Chinese communities”–in other words, we aim primarily at the Sinophone world. At the same time, our descriptions of each item, as well as our databank of writers, directors, and artists, is bilingual because we want non-Chinese speakers to learn a bit about the amazing output of independent Chinese voices over the past 75 years. 

If you want to learn more about this nonprofit, visit the China Unofficial Archives website.

And you can subscribe to the CUA weekly newsletter, which looks at current events in China through the lens of history, via Substack.

In Sparks, I wrote about Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial but at the time it hadn’t been translated into English. Now, thanks to the effort of UCLA professor Michael Berry, it has just been published by Columbia University Press. 

In this review for The Atlantic magazine, I explain why Fang’s novel is so important. The key to understanding it is that land reform is so sensitive to how the PRC writes its own history. In its telling, it was a great, necessary step that fulfilled a promise of justice to rural Chinese.

In fact, it was an incredibly (and purposefully) brutal campaign to eliminate the local landed gentry, which posed a threat to the CCP’s new authoritarian rule. On top of that, the land that farmers did get was soon taken away from them–and to this day they still cannot own land. 

Fang’s novel exposes this troubled history. Making it more significant is that Fang is not a dissident writer, but a pillar of the establishment. The book was also published by a reputable publishing house and even won a prize–until leftists attacked it. This seemed to make the government aware of how subversive the novel really was and they banned it. 

So kudos to Berry and CUP for bringing out this book in English. It sheds new light on China’s past and makes more of Fang’s works available to the English-reading public. (Besides Soft Burial, they also published The Running Flame, about a woman on death row for killing her husband. And of course readers will know Fang’s Wuhan Diary, which made her internationally famous.)

For more on land reform, please check out the China Unofficial Archives, a registered nonprofit that serves as a home for banned Chinese books, magazines, and films. The archive, where I do volunteer work, has a page on land reform with a few other works on the topic, as well as a page dedicated to Fang Fang (no bio up there yet, but we’re working on it!). 

In March I’ll be going to the Netherlands for five days to talk about my favorite topics: Unofficial History, but with an interesting spin: is some version of the Cultural Revolution happening in the West today?

My trip will start on March 12 at 15:15 at Leiden University, where I’ll talk about underground histories with Svetlana Kharchenkova, a cultural sociologist, Bo Wang, a researcher, filmmaker and artist, with the session chaired by  Ying Zhang, a historian at the university. Register here!

After a talk at a class on the 13th, I’ll go to The Hague on the 14th to speak at the Nowhere Bookstore, which is part of a growing diasporic civil society movement outside of China. The bookstore is one of three run by Annie Zhang Jieping, who will moderate. We’ll talk about the link between resistance now and in the past. Registration here.

After  down day on the 15th, I’ll join Annie again on the 16th along with Yuan Li on her Bumingbai podcast for a live recording in Amsterdam. Our topic: why do some Chinese compare events in the United States to China’s Cultural Revolution? That event is unfortunately already sold out but the podcast will air soon after. 

Overall, it will be great to talk to more people from the diaspora and get their feedback on the China Unofficial Archives. We’re looking for more constructive criticism and this will be a great chance. For reasons I don’t entirely get right now, the Netherlands has become a center for Chinese NGO activity–maybe I’ll know more by late March…

For decades, Perry Link has been the dean of foreign scholars writing about independent Chinese thinkers, so it’s a real honor to be reviewed by him in The New York Review of Books. In this review of Sparks, he points out that one of my goals is to redefine what we mean by China:

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

Over the years, the NYRB has been something like my spiritual home. It was at the urging of its former editor, Bob Silvers, that I began my Q&A series with public intellectuals (still up on the Review’s site here) that gave me the impetus to begin researching Sparks in 2010.  And so it’s especially meaningful to be reviewed in its pages, even if the book came out a year and a half ago! But I think people read the Review for the long-term and its influence isn’t measured in book sales or blurbs that you can extract from a review. Instead, it’s the engagement with the book, which this review does beautifully. 

For people not familiar with the Review, you’ll note that the essay is paywalled but please do sign up and you’ll get a few free articles–and perhaps you’ll also subscribe. In an era of diminishing book review sections in newspapers, supporting family-run publications like the Review is especially important. 

The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) cordially invites you to a public panel discussion and book presentation:

What the Struggle for Hong Kong Tells Us About Growing Authoritarianism in China

Under President Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has charted a path toward greater authoritarian rule. Looking at developments within the PRC and in Hong Kong provides insight into how China’s slide toward authoritarianism is actually occurring. It also reveals how citizens or visitors might experience this slide firsthand.

In this discussion, our experts will analyze the receding freedoms of Hong Kongers, the role of underground historians in China who challenge the party line, and how the art world in Hong Kong is navigating censorship to survive and even flourish in the once open, cosmopolitan city. They will also evaluate the role of technology in codifying and entrenching Beijing’s grip over the lives of Chinese people – those who live within the borders of the PRC and beyond them. In doing so, they will assess what these changes mean for Germany’s policy toward China and how Germany’s scholars, business community, and civil society actors should engage with the more authoritarian China of today.

This discussion is based on Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s upcoming book Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, an updated edition of his earlier work Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, which will be released in January 2025 by Bui Jones.

Speakers: 
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine 
Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher with a focus on China 
Minh An Szabó de Buca, cultural journalist and documentary filmmaker 
Shi Ming, Chinese-German journalist and publicist

Moderator: 
Michael Laha, Senior Research Fellow for China and Technology Policy, DGAP

This event will be held in English.

Please register for the event at events@dgap.org.

Link: 

https://dgap.org/en/events/what-struggle-hong-kong-tells-us-about-growing-authoritarianism-china 

Thanks to Italian publisher Neri Pozza, Sparks is coming out in Italian and thanks to two Italy-based academics I’ll be on a four-day seven-lecture tour of the country from Rome to Naples to Milan to Pavia to Florence. 

I’ve put all the details of the tour on the usual speaking/media page but I thought I’d mention how I like the way the book is being presented. First, the subtitle is pretty grabby–“Clandestine Stories from China.” These are indeed clandestine stories, not only in the sense of them being secret but also because the term has a whiff of the conspiratorial, the dangerous, and the underground.

The talks themselves are also cleverly framed for a general audience. Many of them play on the concept of China being a “vulnerable superpower,” which I think is useful, especially because we’re bombarded with hype about China being on the march forward. It is, but it’s also fragile, in part because of the underground historians’ “clandestine stories,” which undermine CCP rule. 

It’s also nice to be speaking at such a variety of  venues: universities, think tanks, and even in a Florentine villa. I’m especially grateful to Enrico Fardella at the University of Naples for organizing the Rome/Naples leg and Axel Berkofsky of the University of Pavia and ISPI in Milan. 

In another era, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo would have been reviewed widely and my review–which appeared a year after the book was published–would have been embarrassingly late. But many societies around the world are focused inward, obsessed with populist concerns, and so this tour-de-force biography was essentially not reviewed in the mainstream press at all. A pity, because it gives us the prequel to Xi’s China–a time of bold efforts to build civil society in China and bold people like the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Read the review here. 

“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.