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Ian Johnson is a senior fellow for Chinese studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a long journalism career in China, where he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2001, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Chinese government’s crackdown on Falun Gong. He is the author of The Souls of China (2017) and Wild Grass (2004), and this fall his latest highly acclaimed book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (2023). In this interview, we spoke about his new book and about how the underground historian movement should impact the world’s view of China.

Q: At the beginning of Sparks, you write that there are similarities between your previous reporting on religious communities in China and this book about underground historians in China. What similarities do you see between those two communities and how did that previous work lead you into this project?

A: Both groups see something fraught at the heart of the current Chinese state. They see a deep-seated problem in the way society is organized, and they also believe that this problem is not discussed in society. The religious communities see it as primarily a spiritual issue. Some of them get to that conclusion from a political point of view: some of the best known preachers in China, for example the jailed preacher Wang Yi, were involved as very young people in Tiananmen in 1989. When those protests failed, they realized that before there could be a political change in China, there had to be a spiritual change. They believe China needs to rediscover its soul and what it stands for as a country, and what Chinese people stand for as a people, before it can solve political issues. 

In the case of underground historians, the issue is a failure to address Chinese history. They’re a bit more political, but they also view history as a quasi-spiritual calling — that history has to be done right, it has to be done honestly, in order for the country to move forward. 

Can you summarize what you were trying to do with this book and why you decided to write it?

I had always approached China from the grassroots level. My first book on China, Wild Grass [published in 2004], was about civil society groups in China. When I finally got a visa to go back to China, starting on January 1, 2009, I stayed for a little more than 11 years. During this time, I knew I wanted to write a book on religion in China, and engage more with thinkers and public intellectuals in China. Over the 2010s, I published 30 interviews with Chinese public intellectuals for the New York Review of Books. One theme that came back over and over again was the problem of China’s unresolved history. So I began working first on the religion book, but at the same time, I was thinking about this being the next book and began writing articles on it in 2013. 

I began to realize that this is not an issue that’s just about the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward; but goes back to the Yan’an period [when the Communist Party was based in the northern area starting in the 1930s and 40s], when counter-historians began to try to write histories of the Communist Party. It continues all the way up to the present, with the ‘white paper’ protests [against China’s strict zero-COVID policies] from last year. A couple of the main characters in the book researched all of these events, helping to show a continuum from the party’s origins to today.

In writing this book, I had to also think about how we view China. We often get caught in an exoticist or orientalist way of looking at China: on the one hand, it’s an ancient civilization with terracotta soldiers, and the Great Wall, while on the other hand, it’s a country where we’re constantly being told that the past doesn’t really matter [because change is so rapid], and that many recent events, such as the Great Famine [of 1959-61] are ‘ancient history’ that nobody cares about. 

This is a strange way of looking at a country because in our own societies — I’m speaking as a North American — events from the 1950s, or 60s and 70s, are not really that old. One hot political issue in the United States now is abortion, which goes back to the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade in the 1970s. That’s the same time as the Cultural Revolution era in China. We don’t think about [Roe v. Wade] as ancient history that nobody cares about anymore. But if you bring up events like the Great Famine, this is considered way back in the past. 

Another objection is to say ‘most people don’t know about this in China’ But this is a truism that you can say about change in any society, in any era. In China, we are indeed dealing with small numbers of people who engage with the forbidden past, but that’s not surprising. What I found interesting is that these people become part of the public debate when society demands answers to problems, such as the white paper COVID protests of last year. Some of the characters I write about in my book played important roles in those protests. That’s because they provide alternative ways of understanding their country. They become increasingly relevant when problems arise. So although their numbers are small, their influence can be great, especially during crises. 

And when you say ‘we are being told that history doesn’t matter in the context of China’, is that sentiment coming from people outside saying it doesn’t matter? Or are you talking about voices within Chinese society?

That’s the conventional way of thinking about China, inside and outside the country. For the government, the past, especially the last 75 years, is glossed over in textbooks unless it’s areas that glorify the Communist Party. Abroad, the implicit assumption is that, up until recently at least, China was this ever-developing, super dynamic, ‘Crazy Rich Asian’ country where things were never standing still. There was a kernel of truth to this, especially in the go-go years of the 2000s, or the 1990s. During this time, it was easy to dismiss the past as irrelevant because the focus was always on an ever-improving future.

Some see what they do as a time capsule for future generations, to let people know that there were still people in Xi Jinping’s China who were active, and trying to discover their country’s history.

A good example is when I was planning to go back to China in 2008 (I had left in 2001). My then boss said to me, ‘everything you know about China has changed, the GDP has doubled since you left’. He was right, but There was this idea of ‘oh my God, this is totally insane, this country is changing and the past is irrelevant’. And we [in the media] participated in a way by putting events such as the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 in the rearview mirror and focusing on future-oriented events, such as China entering WTO.

What motivates the underground historians you write about? 

Many of the people got started on these issues because they wanted to understand what had happened to them in their youth. The founders of Remembrance [one of the underground magazines profiled in the book] had been sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and they wanted to research that era. I think that’s a quite human motivation, just to try to figure out what happened in one’s own life. 

Many, however, have different goals. Some see what they do as a time capsule for future generations, to let people know that there were still people in Xi Jinping’s China who were active, and trying to discover their country’s history. They know that what they’re doing will not be seen in China, this year, or in the near future. But they hope that these works will still be valuable to future generations of Chinese people. They hope to set down accounts from survivors of the past, before these people die off, because if we wait for China to liberalize before exploring the history, they think we will not have these witnesses anymore. 

And others have even more explicitly political goals. They believe that the future of the Communist Party is not set in stone, and that it is vulnerable on many levels. And that by showing a true accounting of the past 75 years of CCP rule, we can help undermine and call into question the party’s right to rule. 

I kept thinking while reading the book that, in the U.S., people are always categorizing Chinese people as dissidents or not dissidents. A lot of the people in the book do not fit into those categories. Not all of them are explicitly political in their histories, and that variation was really illustrative to me.

Yes, I try to avoid using the word dissident because it often implies somebody, let’s say, who is in exile, or under something like house arrest, who’s fighting a lonely struggle against the state; and maybe a corollary to that is that they also have no impact on society because they’re so isolated. While there are certainly people like that in China, this is too limiting in describing China’s counter-history movement. These people are on a spectrum of engagement with society. Most are half inside the system, and half outside the system. Some of the people hold jobs in the universities, or own property, they send their children to school, they raise families but are still engaged in the struggle. 

Can you describe the story of Spark, a magazine that gave the book its title?

There was a group of university students and junior faculty in Lanzhou [in western China] who had been caught up in a political campaign. They were exiled to an area in western Gansu Province. Shortly afterwards, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward. It led to what is widely regarded as the worst famine in recorded history, with up to 45 million people dying. 

The students saw this famine, and decided something had to be done. They launched a journal, which they called Spark, from the Chinese expression, ‘a single spark can light a prairie fire’. The essays in the journal analyzed the root cause of the famine, including issues that are relevant today. Based on their first hand knowledge, they identified problems like the farmers not owning their land, or the state having absolute power over society, which led to corruption and massive abuses. They saw it, correctly, as a systemic problem, and not just a few rotten apples, which is how the party always portrays these issues. 

The group was able to get their hands on a mimeograph machine and was able to run off copies of their hand-written journal, which was only eight pages long. They mailed out copies to different government offices. They were trying to make people aware of the famine. 

The group then started to collect essays and articles for a second issue. Very quickly, however, the police busted the ring. At the time, it was one of the largest counter-revolutionary incidents in PRC history. Three of the group were ultimately executed. And it seemed like this would be the end of it. 

What makes Spark so compelling is that after Mao died, many of these people were then rehabilitated under the Party Secretary at the time, Hu Yaobang. One of them was able to look into her police file. She found that everything had been meticulously preserved, including the two issues of Spark, correspondence, even love letters between two members of the group. In the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium, basic digital technologies made it possible for this magazine to become widely known, simply by creating a PDF out of the photos and then emailing it to other people. This began a slow spread of the story of Spark to public intellectuals in China. Cui Weiping, a famous critic and translator of Vaclav Havel [the former President of the Czech Republic who was previously a playwright and dissident], said, ‘now we have our genealogy’. This is a very powerful idea: understanding that there are people who went before us, who were trying to do the same thing and who came to identical conclusions. 

China’s greatest underground documentary filmmaker, Hu Jie, made a film about the group, and another about a young poet involved in the journal named Lin Zhao. His work helped to spread the knowledge. And then one of the main characters in my book, the journalist and writer Jiang Xue, wrote a long article about it. This was quite symbolic of the spread of a broader movement of recovered memory — this ability to share information, share books, publications in ways that were not possible 25 years ago.

What I find so ironic about this story is that the police file is actually the preserver of this history.

Yes, it’s the bureaucratic state. In times of crisis in the history of the PRC, the state sometimes disgorges information. But I would guess we’ll never get a full look into the archives of the PRC, in a way that we have looked into the Soviet Union. This is why people feel it’s so important to do it themselves, to create counter-archives and counter-histories.

I think people draw on the accounts of the past when there’s a need for it. Long periods of rapid economic growth papers over a lot of the cracks in society. People feel that for all the problems in their society, at least tomorrow’s a better day — my children will be able to go to college and buy an apartment. In this situation, there’s no burning need to challenge the state’s version of events. Even though people may know that a lot of it is bogus, for example that the CCP is corrupt, and even though they see in their daily life things don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, still, life’s getting better and better. So they’re willing to forget about the party’s failings and keep their head down. It’s only a very upright person, who in that kind of era would want to pursue this. 

But as problems mount in society, people begin to look for alternatives to the government’s version of reality. That’s where these underground stories become more important. They offer alternative ways of understanding the origins of China’s present-day problems.

You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that you didn’t want to just focus on the Cultural Revolution. Why do you think that there has been such a focus on that and how did you balance focusing on the Cultural Revolution versus other clearly important historical events?

The Cultural Revolution was obviously an important period in PRC history. I wanted to show the entire range of this discussion, however, because I felt that in the West, there’s a bit of an unhealthy, exclusive focus on the Cultural Revolution. It is the one thing that people know about, if they know anything about the Mao era. And while it’s important, it’s taken a disproportionate role in Chinese and also foreign perceptions of that era, because the people who were most affected by it were urban elites, who later wrote books. This is the tyranny of sources. We have images of the Cultural Revolution. We have handbills, we have posters, we have endless numbers of people in the West reading about it — going back to Wild Swans and other memoirs, many of them written for western audiences. These are all true and legitimate, but they’re all basically the same story told over and over again. 

There are events that were arguably equally or more important, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which destroyed China’s educated elite, an event that paved the way for Mao’s totalitarian control. Or, the Great Famine, during which up to 45 million people died. Of course, those people were farmers primarily. They were illiterate. There were almost no cameras in those areas affected by the famine, so we have almost no images of it. Counter-historians in China have tried to fill in that gap; for example, the documentary filmmaker Hu Jie has done a series of woodblock printings about the famine to try to capture the horror of it. 

Another overlooked event is the campaign against landlords, which set in place the mechanisms for control of Chinese society. The anti-landlord campaign from the early 1950s was a genocidal policy, by the definition of it being an effort to eradicate a class of people. And this was the class of people that had run China previous to 1949 — the gentry, who are sometimes called the literati. By eliminating these people, the party had free rein to implement its policies 

I’m also interested in the motivation of the audience for these counter-histories. You have one scene where one of the regular attendees at a counter-historian lecture was a public security guy. What’s the motivation for someone like to become a consumer of this underground history? 

It’s difficult for any society to confront its dark chapters: you see how long it has taken European countries to confront their colonial histories. It’s especially difficult in a country where the state controls so much of the media, exhibitions, a video game or what’s on television. I think there’s something in the state’s narrative that is not satisfying to people who think about things a little bit. When you’re growing up in China, the longer you live, the more things you’ll see that don’t fit into the state’s narrative. Oftentimes university students are quite gullible because they’ve grown up in the cocoon of state education, and spent their high school years cramming for the college-entrance exam, which basically involves force feeding them government textbooks. But then as they enter the workforce and begin to see how things really work in society, and maybe encounter some problems, they experience the problems of a one-party state. And so this drives a search for alternative explanations. 

…there’s a significant number of people who have a different view of the future, and who are fighting actively in China today to create a different kind of China. 

The case that you mentioned involved a police officer who used to go to public lectures offered by underground historians. Often people in the public security apparatus are quite conflicted by what they see. They understand better than others the state’s two-headed nature. Some of them say, hey, I just want to get ahead, I’m not going to think about anything, I’ve done a good job here. And they just do what they’re told. But even people who do what they’re told sometimes wonder about things. In that scene, the police officer decided to apply some of the ideas he’d learned at the public lectures and be more tolerant. 

You write that exploring underground historians in China has implications for how the outside world should view China. What are those implications?

One of the things that drives me crazy is that outsiders often don’t give Chinese intellectuals the same respect that they gave Eastern European intellectuals in the Cold War. Many of the filmmakers and writers from the Cold War were household names. People knew about Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, or the film director Milos Forman. 

But most Chinese thinkers are not as well known. It’s surprising to me, for example, that no major film festival has done a retrospective of Hu Jie’s work. He’s done three absolutely classic documentary films: Though I Am Gone, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and Spark. 

We’re often wondering, how do we engage with China? Who should we be talking to, who should our interlocutors be? So why don’t we try to bring over more of these people? Sometimes the problem is language. A lot of people don’t speak English. And that means they have difficulty in getting an op-ed in the newspaper, or getting a fellowship at a university, or something like that. 

Another issue might be our view of the state’s ability to control society. I think the dominant way of thinking of China is, to use that wonderful book title, The Perfect Dictatorship by Stein Ringen. We think there’s nothing going on in China except for a string of dystopian horrors, surveillance, cultural genocide. And while all of these things are happening, it’s also important to recognize that there’s a significant number of people who have a different view of the future, and who are fighting actively in China today to create a different kind of China. We tend to only focus on the crackdowns, and not the people who have been working for years to have other visions in China. 

It also has implications for the limits of state power. Even at this time, when the state has never been more powerful than, say, since the Mao era, it does not control everything in China. It’s important to recognize, when we think about the country in the future, that there are alternative visions for the country. And that maybe we shouldn’t think that the system that’s in place will be in place eternally, that change can happen. I don’t mean that China will become a multiparty democracy or something like that. But it’s not too hard to imagine that a prolonged period of stasis and stagnation over the next decade will lead the party to one of its periodic massive corrections, where they may embrace a more open society — and that then these people will come more to the fore.

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