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Gao Ertai: The desert flower that keeps blooming

“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.

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New Work in an Old City

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.

 

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Podcasts and Oral History of China-Watching

One of the unpredictable aspects of writing is to see how interest develops over time. In the case of Sparks, it was published last year and I organized the usual tour, which you can see on the book’s tour page and review page. What I didn’t expect is that I’d still be approached about interviews months later. That’s been the case over the past few months as several very different kinds of podcasts–some focusing on law, others on literature–have asked me about the book.

In addition, I was also given a 17-hour grilling by a Stanford University oral history project of China-watchers–a tiring, fascinating, and sobering series of reflections about my engagement with China since the 1980s and how attitudes have radically changed. I probably will never write my memoirs and this may well stand as my most complete set of thoughts on my career, so far at least.

First though, some thoughts on the podcasts. 

In March, I was on tech guru Mark Hurst’s “Radio Techtonic” show (from minute 8’30”) about the role of technology in keeping China’s underground history movement alive. For me that was really interesting because Mark noticed that my argument in Sparks is somewhat contrarian–yes, technology is being used to control people in China, but simple digital technologies can (still, at least) be used in an asymmetrical fashion as a “weapon of the weak” (to paraphrase James C. Scott’s argument).

In April, Elizabeth M. Lynch interviewed me for the China Law and Policy podcast on counter-histories. I appreciated her tough questioning–why so little on Tiananmen and are young people really interested in this stuff? I think I gave some pretty convincing answers to these points, but you can decide…

Ed Pulford of the New Books Network interviewing me for a podcast. In May I talked to Ed Pulford of the New Books Network about Sparks. The NBN is one of my favorite sources for podcasts–they do several a day so you have to pick and choose–but for me they’re sort of a definitive record of books that have hit the market. Ed is a fellow anthropologist (my PhD at Leipzig is in Sinologie but in a non-German university it would be classified as anthropology) and was super prepared. This short introduction was a masterful exercise in de-exoticizing China by pointing out the role of history in other countries.

Two days later, I went on Lee Moore’s Chinese Literature Podcast, which was also really fun because we could focus on the literary aspect of resistance to CCP rule. In the Cold War, most educated westerners were familiar with great Central and Eastern European intellectuals like Kundera and Solzhenitsyn, so why not their Chinese counterparts today? I ventured some answers.

Finally, I spent 17 hours with Stanford University’s Liu He, who grilled me about my entire career for the Hoover Institution’s oral history project on China watching. Most of it was in-person in Brooklyn but one (see photo at top) was by Zoom. I thought we’d be done in a few hours, but he kept finding interesting threads and pushed me to make analyze what I got right and wrong over a past decade–a sobering exercise!

Not sure where the ledger stands at the end of it all, but he was a really engaged and well-prepared interviewer. (We also spent a fair bit of time together, as you can see from our jokey expressions in this photo.) He went through old stories I did for Baltimore’s The Sun, the WSJ, NYRB, NYT, my three books on China (and even the one not on China) and more recent work at CFR and the China Unofficial Archives. I really appreciated his incredible research into my past.

As for what will happen with the material, some of it could be made public but I was quite honest about the field and so am not sure if I shouldn’t put some of it under lock for a decade.

I write all of this as a kind of update but also as a reflection on how books and ideas have shelf lives that go beyond the initial buzz that one tries to generate on social media. Probably for most authors, this is far more gratifying than the initial interest, which can often be nothing more than a straw fire.

In the future, I’ll be leaving CFR to take up a fellowship in Berlin and devote myself to new projects about China–more on all of that in a later post–but these themes of memory and resistance will continue. I have a new book planned on the uses of religion in Xi’s China, new tools that will make the China Unofficial Archives more useful, and trips back to Asia–perhaps one day even back to China.

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From Toronto to San Diego: 2024 Talks

Sparks came out last September but I have a full plate of mostly public talks through the end of spring, 2024.

The year starts out with talks at York University in Toronto and continues to Yale, Boston University (which made the poster above) and on to Washington, Seattle, Stanford, UC San Diego, Cornell and Princeton. 

For details, including registration, please see my site’s “Speaking and Media” page

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China Unofficial Archives launch

After months of work, on Dec. 13 we launched the China Unofficial Archives, a repository of hundreds of underground periodicals, books, and movies. 

The site is a project that I began to think about when I was working on Sparks, my book on counter-history in China. One key point is that the digital revolution has made it easier than ever for people inside an authoritarian state like China’s to share information by basic technologies, such as PDFs or digital films. And yet much of the information sharing is ad hoc. A person may get an email with a PDF book attached on, say, the Cultural Revolution, but not realize what else has been published or filmed on this topic. Or they might like the author but might not have an easy way to access that person’s works. An online archive, I thought, could help fill this gap.

After incorporating the archive as a non-profit over the summer, I secured funding from a charity, hired a web designer and had invaluable help from people such as the independent journalist Jiang Xue (who also features in Sparks). 

We “launched” via an online event sponsored by Westminister University’s China Centre. I was joined by Gerda Wielander, who has done much research on history and state narratives in China, and Shao Jiang, a London-based scholar who advises the archive. The event will eventually be posted to YouTube. 

For a description of what the site aspires to be, you can see its “About” page here. I also wrote the first in what I hope will be a series of “Curators Notes” by me and various people involved in curating the site. 

As I mention in the note, this is a work in progress. We’ve already received very useful feedback on how to improve it and are also in the middle of uploading hundreds of new movies and other files. We currently have about 850 items in the archive but need to double it–and fill in many holes (also outlined in my note)–before it will really take shape. 

Stay tuned…

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Best books of 2023

With 2023  almost over, five important publications have included Sparks on their “best of 2023” lists, including The New Yorker, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, and The Tablet

 

The New Yorker

“With firm but never dogmatic moral conviction, Johnson pays tribute to the writers, the scholars, the poets, and the filmmakers who found the courage to challenge Communist Party propaganda. These dissenters looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao Zedong’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies. They often paid for their candor with long prison terms, torture, or death. Their conclusions—presented in homemade videos, mimeographed sheets, and underground journals—didn’t reach a wide audience when they appeared. And yet, as Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book, the value of their legacy is incalculable.”

 

The Economist

“A Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist describes the valiant e!orts of China’s “underground historians”, a motley and persistent group of academics, artists, film-makers and journalists attempting to correct the sanitised official record and provide truthful accounts of history. A rare insight into the extraordinary risks that some Chinese take to illuminate the darkest corners of communism.”

 

 

The FT

“‘Who controls the past, controls the future,’ wrote George Orwell. This is a fascinating and important story of dissident historians in China, who are challenging the Communist party’s authorised version of history.”

 

 

 

 

The New Statesman

“In a year of unrelentingly bleak news, I’ve chosen Sparks  (Allen Lane), Ian Johnson’s evocative study of China’s underground historians documents both the relentless crackdown on civil society and intellectual freedom under Xi Jinping, and the quiet courage of those who refuse to be crushed. Drawing their inspiration from earlier acts of resistance that appeared hopeless in their own times, these independent scholars, filmmakers, and journalists have come to view their work as time capsules, determined to preserve an accurate record of the country’s past for future generations. ‘They want future Chinese to know,’ Johnson writes, ‘that in the 2020s, when things had never been darker…. Not everyone had given in.'”

 

The Tablet

“Controlling the interpretation of what has happened in China since the Communist revolution is an integral part of President Xi Jinping’s ever-tightening grip on his vast country. In Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Allen Lane, £25; Tablet price £22.50), Ian Johnson charts the brave attempts of individuals, the ‘underground’ historians, to challenge the party line and reveal the brutal arbitrariness which has marked its rule from the beginning.”

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Xi’s age of Stagnation

Neijuan (the Chinese term for stasis or an inward evolution) now permeates all aspects of life in Xi’s China, leaving the country more isolated and stagnant than during any extended period since Deng launched the reform era in the late 1970s.”

After leaving China in 2020, I returned earlier this year for an extended visit. Some of my observations were of trends that began much earlier; perhaps being away for a few years made them much clearer. In any case, I came away thinking that China is pursuing a deadend path toward ever-greater state control and suppression of individualism, which ultimately means a rejection of the ideas that underpinned its rise in the reform era.

Please read the full article, unpaywalled for now, at this link. And thank you for any constructive feedback!

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SPARKS Tour Dates

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

 

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Coming sept 2023: Sparks

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.

Sparks

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.

Four students from Lanzhou University exiled to the city of Tianshui, standing in front of the party offices. They would publish the journal Spark, which has become a touchstone in the battle for China's history.
The first page of the 1960 journal Spark, founded by Lanzhou University students exiled to western China during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. They witnessed the Great Famine and wrote trenchant essays on China's political system that still echo today.

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. 

Widow's Bridge, Daoxian, where many were beaten and tossed into the river in August 1967.

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

Chinese writer Jiang Xue, whose essays were among the most popular accounts of China's draconian zero-Covid policy.
Chinese underground filmmaker and feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming in her home in Wuhan.

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. 

The artist and filmmaker Hu Jie's depiction of the poet Lin Zhao, forced to wear a "monkey mask" to prevent her from speaking in the days before her execution. Hu's work is an effort to fill in the archives' voids, allowing us to feel the past more viscerally than is possible with words.

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. 

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Hell, Politics, and Religion

Some forthcoming talks are helping me think through a new book, which I want to start writing in 2023 once Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out in September 2023 (more on that in a post coming soon).

One of the talks is at the Asia Society on March 1 and has to do with concepts of hell and the afterlife in China–especially how this played out after the Communist Party tried to destroy most values. Details here.

The second, and more relevant talk to my new book is on the idea of Civil Religion in China. I took a stab at this in early 2023 at a talk at Fordham University and will do so in a more systematic way in March at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, aka Germany’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

I’ll be on a podium with Franciscus Verellen, a distinguished historian of religious life in middle-period China (and along with Kristofer Schipper the editor of one of the great recent works of sinological study, The Taoist Canon, which is a magically written and illustrated two-volume companion to the canon, which is essentially an encyclopedia of Taoist thought).

Prof. Verellen will talk about state and religion in classical China and I’ll talk about the concept in the country today, especially as the Communist Party uses it to cement legitimacy.

You can see details of both talks on this site’s “Talks and Media Appearances” page. The German talk will be in German. Both will be posted to YouTube, and I think the German talk will have subtitles.

If you get a chance to hear these and have feedback, please do send me an email at ij@ian-johnson.com I’d appreciate any feedback.

Thanks!

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Faithful Disobedience

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

 

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The President’s Inbox

It’s an honor to be on “The President’s Inbox,” one of the snappiest podcasts (most are about 30 minutes long) on offer. And I don’t say that because my supervisor at CFR, Jim Lindsay, is the host! It is really a great summary of key issues in the news and Jim keeps it moving briskly–as one would expect for something that the president might listening to at the start of the day. On this episode we discuss the upcoming 20th congress of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping’s norm-busting third term. Here’s a link to the podcast, which has links to Apple podcasts, Google, and others.   

(Sensible Person Trigger Warning: contains inappropriate and somewhat tongue-in-cheek comparisons to the Junkers in 1933, and Mario Puzo’s most famous character.)

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What is a Party Congress and Why Does it Matter?

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. 

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