纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英星火不熄铁拳也不能粉碎的中国地下史学家运动

In 1959, a group of university students in the northwestern Chinese city of Tianshui embarked on a quixotic plan. China was in the midst of the Great Famine, a catastrophe caused by government policies that would kill as many as 45 million. These young people had witnessed farmers starving to death and cannibalism; they also saw how the government had brutally punished or killed people who appealed for help. They felt someone needed to do something to spread word of what was happening. They decided to publish a journal.

1959年，中国西北城市天水的一群大学生开始了一场螳臂当车的计划。当时中国正处于“大饥荒”时期，这场由政府政策引发的灾难导致了多达4500万人死亡。这些年轻人亲眼目睹了农民饿死和吃人的场面；也看到了政府如何残酷惩罚或杀害上访求救者。他们觉得有必要做点什么，把正在发生的事情传出去。于是，他们决定办一本杂志。

The students called it Spark, after a Chinese expression, “xinghuo liaoyuan,” or “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” They hand-wrote the essays onto plates and, with the help of local officials, used a mimeograph machine to run off copies.

学生们将这本杂志命名为《星火》，取自“星火燎原”之意。他们将文章刻在钢板上，并在当地官员帮助下用油印机印刷。

At just eight pages, and with no photos or graphics, Spark looked primitive. But it was filled with articles that got to the heart of China’s authoritarian politics — then and now: Farmers weren’t allowed to own property, all of which belonged to the state; top leaders brooked no opposition; corruption was endemic; and even critics loyal to the regime were persecuted. The lead article on the first page set the tone:

《星火》杂志只有八页，没有照片或插图，看起来十分粗陋。但里面的文章全都正中中国专制政治——无论是在当时还是当下——的要害：农民不可以拥有私产，一切都属于国家；最高领袖容不下任何反对意见；官场腐败猖獗；甚至连忠于政权的批评者都受到迫害。杂志首页的发刊词就已经奠定了基调：

“Why did the once progressive Communist Party become so corrupt and reactionary less than ten years after coming to power, with complaints and rebellions at home, and falling into an embarrassing situation abroad? This is because the people’s world is regarded as its private property, and all matters are managed by party members.”

“为什么曾经是进步的共产党执政不到十年就变得如此腐化反动，在国内怨声鼎沸，叛乱四起；在国外陷入处处楚歌的境地呢？这是由于把全民的天下当做私有财产，事无巨细，清一色由党员来管理的结果。”

There would be no second issue. Within months, 43 people associated with the magazine were arrested. Three were later executed, and the rest were sentenced to years in labor camps.

这本杂志没能出到第二期。几个月之内，与该杂志有关的43人被逮捕。三人后来遭处决，其余人都被送去劳改多年。

Spark had lasted less than a year and seemed extinguished. Over the Chinese Communist Party’s nearly three-quarters of a century in power, it could have been forgotten, nothing more than one of countless small acts of outrage against the party’s unchecked powers. Instead, for many Chinese people, its story is now synonymous with resistance to one-party rule.

“星火”燃烧了不到一年似乎就熄灭了。在中国共产党执政近四分之三世纪的时间里，它不过是反对党权力滥用的无数小规模反抗之一，可能转瞬就被遗忘。但在许多中国人看来，它的故事如今已经成为抵抗一党专政的代名词。

How? Through the efforts of China’s counterhistorians, a group of citizens united in their desire to tell the whole story of Communist Party rule, to include in China’s collective memory events like the famines of the last century and the virus outbreaks of today. One key member of this movement is a 49-year-old journalist named Jiang Xue, whose determination to tell the true story of what happened in her hometown — to not let yet another piece of China’s history get lost or distorted — helped turn Spark into a source of inspiration to those who follow in its creators’ footsteps, making it a testament to the limits of even the harshest measures to crush resistance.

如何做到的？这是通过中国一群非主流历史学家的努力实现的。这些地下历史学家是一群志愿团结在一起，希望讲述共产党统治全貌的公民，他们将上世纪的饥荒与当代的疫情等事件纳入了中国的集体记忆。49岁的记者江雪是该运动的关键人物之一，为了不让另一段中国历史丢失或被扭曲，她决心讲述发生在她家乡的真实故事，这让《星火》激励了那些追随其创作者脚步的人，证明了即使最严酷的镇压手段也是有限的。

Around the world, history has become a battleground for the present. Americans debate the centrality of slavery to their country’s founding. Europeans grapple with the brutality of their colonial empires. Young Africans unearth buried memories of the Nigerian civil war and the apartheid era. One could easily include Japan, Singapore, India and dozens of other countries where events that occurred before most people were born have become crucial to shaping their futures.

在世界各地，历史已成为争夺当下的战场。美国人就奴隶制在建国过程中的核心作用展开争论。欧洲人努力面对当初殖民帝国的残暴行径。年轻的非洲人则在挖掘尼日利亚内战和种族隔离时代被埋葬的记忆。日本、新加坡、印度以及其他数十个国家也不例外，在这些地方，大多数人出生前发生的事件已成为塑造他们未来的关键。

But nowhere is this idea more potent than in China. For modern Chinese leaders, history is the key to their legitimacy: History chose the Communist Party to save China; history has determined that it has succeeded; and history blesses its continued hold on power. This history is of course written by the party, which employs armies of scribes, filmmakers, videographers and journalists to push its version of events, both recent and ancient. Through them, the party controls textbooks, movies, television documentaries, popular history magazines, even video games.

但这种掌握历史叙述权的想法在中国表现得尤为强烈。对现代中国领导人来说，历史是其合法性的关键：历史选择了共产党来救中国；历史决定了它的成功；历史也将确保它继续掌权。当然，这个历史是由共产党书写的，它雇佣了大量文人、电影人、摄像师和记者，帮助推动它对或近或远的时间里发生的各种事件的描述。通过他们，中共控制着教科书、电影、电视纪录片、通俗历史杂志，甚至电子游戏。

The result is a population that is often unaware of the recent past. The Great Famine of 1959-61 is still known euphemistically as “three difficult years” caused mainly by natural disasters. Discussion of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, a time when state-led violence claimed as many as two million lives, shuttered schools and sent educated people to work as laborers, is increasingly taboo. The erasure goes beyond events of last century. Even the Covid crisis has been scrubbed, with whistle-blowers turned into pro-government heroes and the harsh lockdowns now off limits in public discussion.

因此，人们对最近的过去往往一无所知。1959-1961年的大饥荒仍被委婉地称为主要由自然灾害造成的“三年困难时期”。在1966-1976年的“文化大革命”期间，由国家主导的暴力夺去了多达200万人的生命，学校被迫停课，知识分子被送去劳动改造；关于“文革”的讨论眼下越来越成为禁忌。被抹杀的不仅仅是发生于上个世纪的事情。就连新冠危机也被抹去，吹哨人被塑造成支持政府的英雄，严厉的封锁现在也成为公开讨论不可触及的禁区。

But a growing number of Chinese see this monopoly on the past as the root of their country’s authoritarian malaise. If people grow up thinking that the Chinese Communist Party is led by a group of meritocratic officials (instead of leaders appointed in backroom deals), that it rules China with a strict but fair civil service (instead of one lacking checks on its power) and defends national borders that have existed for centuries (instead of the inherited territories of a gunpowder empire), then they will have a hard time understanding why China is prone to purges, corruption and ethnic clashes. In short, if they believe that only the Chinese Communist Party can rule China, they will never question its right to rule.

不过，有越来越多的中国人认为，这种对历史的垄断正是中国专制主义流弊的根源。如果人们从小到大认为中共是由一群任人唯贤（而非通过幕后交易任命）的官员领导，通过严格但公平（而非缺乏权力制约）的公务员体系来统治中国，捍卫存在了数百年（而非从一个四处征战的帝国继承）的国家边界，那么他们就很难理解为什么中国容易发生清洗、腐败和种族冲突。简而言之，如果他们相信只有中国共产党才能统治中国，那么就永远不会质疑其统治的权利。

This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past 20 years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films.

这种历史何其重要的信念正在推动一场全国性的地下史学家运动，在过去20年的时间里，它逐渐形成。我把他们统称为历史学家，他们是中国最聪明的一批人，其中有大学教授、独立电影制作人、地下杂志出版商、小说家、艺术家和记者。有些人可能被视为持不同政见者，但大多数人或多或少都处于体制内，始终从事的是体制内工作，拥有财产，有家有口。他们冒着失去事业和前途甚至是牢狱之灾的风险，出版秘密杂志、禁书和独立纪录片。

Underground historians have existed since the start of the People’s Republic, but for the first 50 years of Communist rule they were isolated individuals. Their articles, artworks and books were quickly seized by the security apparatus. They often did not even know of one another.

自中华人民共和国成立以来，地下历史学家就一直存在，但在共产党统治的前50年里，他们都是孤立的个体。他们的文章、艺术作品和书籍很快就被安全机构没收。他们甚至常常不认识彼此。

But over the past decade, I’ve accompanied these underground historians as they’ve formed a nationwide network that has survived repeated crackdowns. They share stories, heroes and common beliefs that they can now distribute relatively easily thanks to basic digital technologies, such as PDFs, affordable digital cameras and laptop movie-editing software. And when the government is overwhelmed by mass unrest, such as during the Covid lockdowns in late 2022, they are able to inject their ideas into the public debate.

但在过去的十年里，我始终关注着这些地下史学家，他们形成了一个全国性的网络，在多次的镇压中得以幸存。他们分享故事、分享英雄，分享共同的信念，这得益于并不复杂的数码技术，比如PDF文件、价格能够接受的数码相机和笔记本电脑上的影片编辑软件，他们现在可以相对容易地传播这些东西。当大规模的骚乱令政府穷与应付时，例如2022年底的疫情封锁期间，他们就能够将自己的想法注入公共辩论中。

The rise of China’s underground history movement challenges conventional wisdom on how to view the country. The dominant way of understanding China today is that nothing happens there except a string of dystopian horrors: surveillance, cultural genocide, mindless nationalism. As someone who has written extensively about religious and political persecution, I know these problems are real. But so, too, are Chinese people with other visions. Critical voices still exist.

中国地下历史运动的兴起挑战了人们如何看待这个国家的传统观念。今天，对中国的主流看法是，那里只有一连串反乌托邦的恐怖——监控、文化灭绝、盲目的民族主义。作为一名撰写过大量关于中国的宗教和政治迫害文章的人，我知道这些问题是的确存在的。但是，有其他愿景的中国人也是存在的。批评的声音仍然存在。

The persistence of China’s counterhistory movement also calls into question assumptions about the Communist Party’s ability to dominate society. Despite overwhelming odds, people inside China still publish works and make films that challenge authority. Their ideas still spread, and when problems in society reach a boiling point — as they have over the past year — it is they who are often looked to for different ways of viewing the present.

反正史(counterhistory)运动在中国的持续存在也让人对有关中共统治社会能力的假设产生疑问。尽管困难重重，生活在中国的人们还是在发表作品，制作挑战权威的电影。他们的理念得到传播，当社会中的问题达到沸腾的状态——就像去年那样——人们往往向他们寻求看待当下的不同方式。

Perhaps most important, the efforts of these people have allowed young Chinese to rediscover a lineage of like-minded people stretching back to the prehistory of the People’s Republic. Books that were once available only in foreign research libraries are now easily shared digitally. Stories of heroic resistance fighters are documented in films that are circulated on the sly. Where critical thinkers in China once often worked alone, they now share a powerful collective memory of Chinese people standing up to authoritarian rule.

也许最重要的是，这些人的努力让中国年轻人重新发现了自己与共和国早期的志同道合者之间的联系。曾经仅存于外国学术书库的图书现在能以数字形式方便地分享。电影记录英勇抵抗的故事，并在私下里传看。持着审辩态度的思想者在中国曾经是各自为战，现在他们拥有中国人民反抗专制统治的强大集体记忆。

Jiang Xue might never have felt the need to keep the memory of Spark alive if it weren’t for her own family’s story. As with many underground historians, her belief in the power of history started at home.

如果不是因为自己家族的历史，江雪可能永远不会想到要去延续《星火》的记忆。和许多地下历史学家一样，她相信历史的力量始于家中。

In early 1960, during the Great Famine, Jiang Xue’s grandfather Zhang Rulin, his wife and their four children received a daily ration of one large corn bun to split among them. Zhang Rulin could see that they would starve, and so he made a decision: One of them would have to die so that the others could have enough to survive. But how to choose, and how to make the others go along with this sacrifice?

1960年初，大饥荒期间，江雪的祖父张儒林（音）、他的妻子和他们的四个孩子每天能分到一个大玉米面馍馍。张儒林知道他们会吃不饱，于是做了一个决定：其中一个人需要死掉，这样其他人才能活下去。但是如何选择，如何让其他人接受这种牺牲？

Jiang Xue tells the story the way her father did on every Chinese New Year’s Eve when she was a little girl:

江雪讲了一个她儿时父亲每年大年夜都会讲的故事：

“Grandfather was a just man. Every day he would take a knife and cut the bun into six equal pieces. One for each person. Each one the same. He weighed each piece on a scale. My youngest aunt — she was 1 year old — she got the same as her father. But he needed more. He was the only laborer in the family. But everyone got the same. They all survived. He starved to death. He sacrificed his life for us.”

“我的祖父是个非常公正的人。他会用刀把馍馍切成6等份。每人一份。每份一样大。家里最小的孩子（我的小姨）和祖父的馍馍一样大。但他需要劳动，需要更多食物。大家都活了下来，但祖父却饿死了。”

To make sure the children learned their family history, every year Jiang Xue’s father and mother would bundle them in their winter clothes and hike up the hill behind their house for half an hour to a small plateau where her grandfather was buried. The family paid tribute, bringing food and kowtowing on the icy ground three times. Then her father would tell the story, starting each time with the words “Back when we were starving ….”

为了让孩子们了解家族史，江雪的父母每年都会让他们穿上冬衣，徒步半个小时来到屋后小山上的一小块平地，那里埋葬着祖父的遗骨。一家人带着食物，在冰天雪地里磕上三个响头。然后她的父亲就会讲起这个故事，每次都以“当年我们饿着肚子……”开头。

These family experiences gave Jiang Xue a skepticism toward authority that only grew after she graduated from college. Her legal name is Zhang Wenmin, but when she first started out as a journalist, she took the pen name Jiang Xue — which literally means “river snow” — from a ninth-century poem about a fisherman alone in a boat on a snowy river. The image is one of the most indelible in Chinese poetry, implying a person holding out against the odds, in a solitary pursuit that many might not understand.

这些家庭经历让江雪对权威产生怀疑，并在她大学毕业后愈演愈烈。她的正式姓名是张文敏，但当她刚开始做记者时，她取了笔名“江雪”——字面意思是“江上的雪”——它来自一首九世纪的诗，描写了一个渔夫在落雪的江上独自驾舟。这是中国诗歌中最令人难忘的形象之一，暗示着一个人在逆境中坚持不懈，孤独地追求着许多人可能无法理解的东西。

She began her career at China Business News in 1998, during a magical period for media in China. Newspapers at the time were encouraged to make money and appeal to readers. Censorship still existed but was relatively lax.

1998年，她在《第一财经日报》开始了自己的职业生涯，当时正是中国媒体的一段神奇时期。当时的报纸被鼓励面向市场。审查制度仍然存在，但相对宽松。

In 2003, Chinese journalism seemed poised on the brink of transformation. The beating death of a migrant from another province in police custody in Guangzhou that year galvanized public intellectuals, who successfully called for the prosecution of a dozen civil servants and a rethinking of how migrants were viewed. Suddenly, it seemed that the media and civil society could effect change, even in a partially closed system like China’s. Journalists like Jiang Xue took on increasingly ambitious projects: forced evictions, corruption and environmental problems.

2003年，中国新闻业似乎处于转型边缘。那一年，一名外来务工人员在广州被警察拘押期间遭殴打致死的事件激起了公共知识分子的愤怒，他们成功地呼吁起诉十几名公务员，并重新思考如何看待农民工。突然之间，媒体和公民社会似乎可以影响变革，即使在中国这样一个部分封闭的体系中也是如此。像江雪这样的记者开始报道越来越宏大的题材：强迫拆迁、腐败和环境问题。

But slowly — maybe inevitably — the party began to push back. It regained control over newsrooms, installing more acquiescent editors. By the early 2010s, it narrowed the range of topics that could be investigated. Jiang Xue stayed at her paper until 2014, when her editors issued an order: Publish only articles that spoke positively of the government. Feeling that she was being set up to be fired, Jiang Xue quit. Thus began her work as a freelance writer.

但慢慢地——也许是不可避免地——共产党开始反击。它重新控制了新闻编辑室，安排了更多顺从的编辑。到2010年代初，党缩小了可以调查的主题范围。江雪一直在她的报社工作，直到2014年，编辑发布了一条命令：只发表正面评价政府的文章。江雪觉得自己迟早会被解雇，于是辞职了。从此，她开始了自由撰稿人的生涯。

Jiang Xue was already known as a leading voice in China’s journalism community. But now she was free from official constraints, allowing her to write articles that made her known in China and abroad as one of the country’s leading independent journalists.

当时，江雪已被视为是中国新闻界的代表人物。但摆脱了官方限制之后，她得以写出作为中国知名的独立记者享誉海内外的文章。

One article that cemented her reputation was a 2015 piece called “A Year as a Wife,” which profiled Meng Qun, the spouse of a prominent human rights lawyer. It was a rarity, moving the focus away from the often macho world of dissent in China to the many courageous women — like herself — fighting for change.

奠定江雪业界声誉的是她在2015年发表的《一个妻子的这一年》，这是一篇关于一位著名人权律师的妻子孟群的人物特写。该文章角度非常罕见，将关注焦点从中国异见人士的阳刚世界转移到许多为变革而奋斗的勇敢女性——包括江雪自己——身上。

That article, however, also firmly put her on the radar of China’s fearsome security apparatus. She detailed her challenges in a 2017 article, “Shut Up. You Look Like an Enemy of the State.” It analyzed the increasing use of digital technology to keep track of people like herself and also how ordinary people were being kept ignorant of their own history.

但这篇文章也让她引起了可怕的中国安全机构的关注。她在2017年的文章《闭嘴，你看起来很像国家的敌人》中详细描述了自己遇到的困难。该文章分析了数字技术如何被越来越多地用于追踪她这样的人，以及普通人为何对自身经历的历史一无所知。

“If there is an intangible cage over this land, with us inside it, can it be that it is impervious to the influence of intelligence?” she wrote. “How long can the common people be kept from the common knowledge they ought to have about the world?”

“如果这土地上有另一个无形的牢笼，那我们身在其中，心智难道不是无时不在受影响吗？”她写道。“普通人本应获取的关于这世界的常识，要拖延多久才能得到呢？”

The year before, she had begun to grow interested in the story of Spark. One day, a professor visiting from another city asked her if she had heard of the publication. She hadn’t and was surprised to hear that it had originated in her hometown, Tianshui. That evening, the professor did something that would have been impossible for previous generations of public intellectuals: He emailed her a 500-page PDF of documents about the case, including a book of memoirs published in Hong Kong and the police confessions extracted from the students. Later, she even found love letters between two of the publication’s main writers. She was surprised that no one had written about it in depth for a general audience.

在写这篇文章的前一年，她开始对《星火》的故事产生兴趣。有天，一位外地来访的教授问她是否听过这本刊物。她没听说过，在得知该杂志起源于她的家乡天水后，她十分惊讶。当晚，那位教授做了一件此前几代公共知识分子不可能做到的事情：他给江雪用电子邮件发来了一份关于“星火案”的500页PDF文件，其中包含一本香港出版的回忆录和学生遭公安拷问后的供词。后来，她甚至发现了该杂志两位主笔写给彼此的情书。令她惊讶的是，居然没有人为普通读者写过关于此事的深度文章。

Intrigued, she called up her father. Had he heard about it as a boy? He had not, but he knew people who could help. A few days later, Jiang Xue was on a train back home to find out more. That began years of research into the magazine. She started in her hometown but the project took her across China, traveling at her own expense to track down the now-elderly students who had founded Spark, to see if their stories held any lessons for today’s China.

出于好奇，她给父亲打了电话。他小时候有没有听说过这本杂志呢？他没听说过，但他知道有人能帮上忙。几天后，江雪就坐上了返乡的火车，回去搜集更多情况。由此她也开始了对该杂志长达数年的研究。江雪从自己的家乡开始探访，但为了这个项目，她自费走遍中国，寻找创办《星火》的那些今已垂垂老矣的学生，探究当代中国是否能以他们的故事为鉴。

She was aided by other underground historians, who gave her advice and encouragement. She talked to one of China’s greatest underground documentary filmmakers, Hu Jie, who has made two films that deal with Spark. A Xi’an-based counterhistorian, Zhang Shihe, helped her edit a short film about one of her interviews. And she had long talks with Ai Xiaoming, a feminist scholar and prolific documentary filmmaker who made a six-hour film about a notorious labor camp near Jiang Xue’s hometown.

她得到了其他地下历史学者的帮助，他们给了她建议和鼓励。她采访了中国最杰出的地下纪录片制作人之一胡杰，后者拍摄过两部与《星火》相关的影片。常住西安的反正史历史学者张世和帮她剪辑了一段采访的短片。她还与艾晓明有过长谈，后者是一位女权问题学者，拍摄过多部纪录片，其中一部长达六个小时的影片是关于江雪老家附近一处臭名昭著的劳改农场。

In 2019, Jiang Xue’s piece on Spark appeared in the Hong Kong magazine Today. It is by far the longest and most involved article she has written, totaling over 40,000 Chinese characters, or about 28,000 words, and stands as the definitive written account of Spark and the system it challenged.

2019年，香港《今天》杂志刊载了江雪关于《星火》的文章。这是她迄今为止写过最长、涉及面最广的文章，总计四万多字，堪称介绍《星火》及其所挑战的体制方面的最权威书面记录。

Written in the first person, the article is only partly about the past. At its heart, it is Jiang Xue’s own discovery of a forgotten chapter of her hometown’s history. In a series of vignettes, she takes us on visits with the survivors whose efforts produced Spark. In their own words, they take us back to the era of the Great Famine, and describe their efforts today to fight against official disremembering. Talking to one of the students, now in his 80s, Jiang Xue asks how often he thinks of his classmates.

文章以第一人称写成，对历史的叙述只占到部分内容。文章的核心是江雪发掘家乡遭到遗忘的历史篇章的过程。在一系列的短文中，她引领读者拜访了那些曾奋力创作《星火》的幸存者。他们讲述的亲身经历将我们带回了“大饥荒”时代，他们还描述了如今为对抗官方的刻意遗忘所做的努力。其中一位受访学生如今已是耄耋之年，江雪问他现在是否还会怀念当年的同学。

“Very often.”

“经常这样。”

“You think of their voice and their smile,” she says.

“想起他们那时候的音容笑貌，”她说。

“Yes.”

“对。”

“The way they were when they were young.”

“（他们）年轻时候的样子。”

“Yes, I will never forget them, until the day that I disappear from this earth I won’t forget them. Because these people, they were all extremely kindhearted. They were sublime. So we should remember them. I wish that this country could draw on its historical tragedies and not repeat them. We should draw on these lessons. I hope that young people can develop a sense of justice and carry forward the virtue of having a sense of justice. People should dare to act, but not make unnecessary sacrifices.”

“对，我永远不会忘，直到我在地球上消失的那一天我也不会忘记。因为这些人都是善良透顶的人，都是非常崇高的人，应该被人们所记住。我希望，我们国家要吸取（教训），历史的悲剧不要重演，要吸取这个教训。我也更希望年轻人要有正义感，要发扬有正义感的品德。应该敢做敢为。但是，不要做无谓的牺牲。”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it?” Jiang Xue asks.

“太可惜了，不是吗？”江雪问道。

“People should cherish their lives but be brave when they need to.”

“既要珍惜自己的生命，当需要的时候，也应该勇于慷慨地奉献出来。”

Jiang Xue says that piece is the most meaningful she has done, especially because it was about her own town’s history. Her family’s Chinese New Year ritual made her understand that her grandfather had died of starvation. But it was only after she researched Spark that she realized the entire context of the famine — and most important, how some people had fought back.

江雪说，这是她最有意义的作品，尤其是因为它讲述了自己老家的历史。她家过春节的仪式让她明白，自己的祖父死于饥饿。但直到研究了《星火》，她才明白饥荒的整个大背景，更重要的，还有那些人曾经的反抗。

The outpouring of support after publication also moved her. The article was widely circulated on the mainland in PDF form. A reader in Tianshui who ran a printing business volunteered to professionally print and bind dozens of copies of the magazine so that older people could read it. Another reader in Tianshui wrote to Jiang Xue, telling her that she vividly remembered the mass rally there to condemn the students and how one of them, Tan Chanxue, had stood strong and tall during the hours of humiliation and threats. “Now I know she was a real hero!” the woman wrote.

文章发表后得到的大量支持也让她深受感动。文章以PDF格式在大陆广泛传播。一位在天水经营印刷业务的读者主动提出印刷装订一批杂志，以便老年人阅读。另一位天水读者写信给江雪，称自己仍清楚记得当地批斗学生的群众集会，以及其中一位学生谭蝉雪如何在漫长的羞辱和威胁中傲然而立的样子。“现在我知道她是个真正的英雄！”她在信中写道。

“Spark is history,” Jiang Xue told me. “But it’s an unfinished history. The same problems the older generation faced, especially the lack of freedom of expression, is the same issue I face today. You look at Covid and all the unnecessary suffering and death, and it’s all because of a lack of freedom of expression.”

“《星火》是历史，”江雪告诉我。“但它是段未完待续的历史。老一辈面对过的问题，尤其是缺乏言论自由，也是我在今天面对的问题。看看新冠疫情和所有那些不必要的痛苦和死亡，一切都是因为缺乏言论自由。”

But the toll of challenging the Chinese Communist Party on its most sensitive ground — history — has been high. For years, she had to rely on her savings to get by. Her work clashed with her husband’s desire for a successful career as a researcher on religion in a government think tank. When “thought police” visited his institute and issued a warning, he asked her to stop her work. She refused and in 2021 the couple divorced.

但挑战历史这一中共最敏感领域的代价是巨大的。江雪多年来都只能靠积蓄度日。她的工作与身为政府智库宗教研究员的丈夫想要事业有成的愿望发生了冲突。当“思想警察”到研究所发出警告，丈夫要求她停止手上的工作。她拒绝了，两人于2021年离婚。

What sustains Jiang Xue and many other underground historians is the sense of community that their movement provides. Some of her interviewees have become close friends, such as Tan Chanxue, whom she regularly visited until she died in 2018. This past June, while she was traveling in North America, she phoned Xiang Chengjian, who helped print the magazine in 1960. She calls him on every major holiday just to say hello and touch base for half an hour or so. This time it was around the Dragon Boat Festival, a particularly apt holiday because it is rooted in the story of a famous poet from antiquity who committed suicide to protest government misrule.

支撑江雪和其他许多地下历史学者走下去的是他们这场运动所提供的群体归属感。一些受访者成为了江雪的好友，比如谭蝉雪，在她于2018年去世前，江雪经常拜访她。今年6月，她在北美旅行期间还致电曾在1960年为《星火》出版出过力的向承鉴。逢年过节她都会打电话问候，两人会聊半小时左右的家常。那次是在端午节前后，这个节日特别应景，因为它起源于古代一位著名诗人自杀抗议朝政败坏的故事。

“Uncle Xiang,” she said over the video call, “people still care about Spark. No one has forgotten it.”

“向叔，”她在视频电话里说，“大家都很关心《星火》。谁都没有忘记。”

At the start of one of her articles, Jiang Xue quoted the philosopher Hannah Arendt on the relevance of the people she profiles — and her own life:

在一篇文章的开头，江雪引用了哲学家汉娜·阿伦特的话，阐述她所描绘人物的关联性——以及她自己的人生：

“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth — this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun.”

“即使是在最黑暗的时代中，我们也有权去期待一种启明。这种启明或许不来自理论和概念，而更多地来自一种不确定的、闪烁而又很微弱的光亮。这光亮源自某些男人和女人，源于他们的生命和作品。他们在几乎所有情况下都点燃着，并把光散射到他们在尘世所拥有的生命所及的全部范围。像我们这样长期习惯了黑暗的眼睛，几乎无法告知人们，那些光到底是蜡烛的光芒还是炽烈的阳光。”

I was struck by how the lines applied to anyone working for change in China today: Is their work pointless, or trailblazing? The light of a candle, or a blazing sun?

对于所有致力于今日中国变革之人来说，这段文字是如此相得益彰，令我深受触动：他们的努力究竟是无谓，还是革新？那是蜡烛的光芒，还是炽烈的阳光？

Arendt’s quote is especially apt because it is open-ended. It doesn’t imply that people working for change in dark times are bound to win because good always trumps evil, or some other cliché. But the implication is clear: In dark times, light is precious; it always matters.

阿伦特的引言之所以十分贴切，因为它没有预设结局。在黑暗时代里为变革奋斗的人不一定能赢，邪不压正或其他一些老套说法不一定适用。但这话蕴含的意义明确的：在黑暗时代，光明弥足珍贵；它永远都很重要。

For people who see China as hopelessly authoritarian — and this is by far the dominant view in many countries today — they will note the troubles faced by people like Jiang Xue or others involved in the counterhistory movement. Tan Hecheng, a writer from Hunan, for example, has spent decades chronicling government-ordered extrajudicial killings in one Chinese county, documenting the murders that took place at its lakes, rivers and bridges. The price, however, includes being marginalized and the constant threat of retribution. Ai Xiaoming, the filmmaker, has made numerous documentaries but is barred from leaving China. And the underground publication Remembrance has published more than 340 issues over the past 15 years, but its editors face regular harassment and police surveillance.

那些认为中国威权主义无可救药的人——这是当今许多国家的主流观点——会指出江雪和其他参与反正史运动的人所面临的麻烦。例如，湖南作家谭合成花了数十年时间记载中国一个县政府下令执行的法外处决，描写了发生在该县湖泊、河流和桥梁上的谋杀案。然而，随之而来的代价包括被主流社会边缘化，还有持续不断的报复威胁。曾制作多部纪录片的导演艾晓明被禁止出境。地下出版物《记忆》在过去15年已出版340多期，但其编辑经常面临骚扰和警方监视。

And yet this would be a selective reading of these people’s lives and the history of this 75-year movement. Like other underground historians, Jiang Xue still writes, and her articles are still widely read in China. Others repeatedly find opportunities to make movies, edit magazines and write historical novels that challenge the state’s campaigns of disremembering. They are persecuted. Their journals or film festivals are shut down. But they return, again and again, just as they and their forebears have for 75 years.

然而，这只是对他们的人生，以及这场维系了75年之久的运动历程的片面解读。和其他地下历史学者一样，江雪仍在写作，她的文章在中国仍被广泛阅读。其他人也在不断寻找机会，通过拍摄影片、编辑杂志和撰写历史小说来挑战政府的遗忘运动。他们受到了迫害。杂志被封，电影节被叫停。但他们总会卷土重来，他们和他们的前辈75年来都是如此。

Measuring their impact is difficult in a state like China. But anecdotally, I’ve seen their works posted and reposted again and again, especially over the past couple of years. Social media can be an echo chamber, of course, but when I lived in China during the first months of the pandemic, these counternarratives suddenly seemed to be everywhere, as Chinese people searched for different ways of understanding how authoritarianism, once again, had led to a serious challenge for the country.

在中国这样的国家，要衡量他们的影响力是很困难的。但有趣的是，我总能发现有人不断发布和转发他们的作品，特别是在过去几年。社交媒体当然可能是个回音室，但当疫情刚暴发的最初几个月我还住在中国时，这些反正史的叙事似乎突然无处不在，因为中国人都在寻找各种方法去理解威权主义为何再次给国家带来了严峻挑战。

I do not mean to offer false optimism but the realism of someone who has spent more than 20 years inside China since the mid-1980s, including all of the 2010s, when Xi Jinping took power and carried out his vision of a strong state. Control hasn’t been this tight since the 1970s. These are dark times. It is also true that “the internet” as people imagined it in the 1990s is easily controlled by authoritarian states, making social media more a tool of control than of freedom.

我无意宣扬虚假的乐观主义，但这是一个从上世纪80年代中期开始在中国生活了20多年——包括习近平上台并开始实现其强国愿景的整个2010年代——的人所经历的现实。中国自20世纪70年代以来从未面临如此严厉的管控。这就是黑暗的时代。也正如上世纪90年代人们所想象的那样，“互联网”极易受到威权国家的控制，使得社交媒体更像一种统治工具而非自由载体。

But the fact that people still resist and do so in a more coordinated form than at any time in the history of the People’s Republic seems more significant than the banal point that an authoritarian regime is authoritarian. The fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed. China’s underground historians may be working under the shadow of a leviathan, but they’re also part of our intellectual world and part of a larger global conversation over how we approach our past and create our future.

但人们仍在抵抗，并以共和国历史上前所未有的团结之道进行抵抗，这一事实应该比独裁政权只有独裁的陈词滥调更加重要。事实上，独立思想在中国依然存在。它并没有被碾碎。中国的地下历史学者或许在巨大的阴影之下工作，但他们是我们知识界的一份子，也是关于我们如何探究过去、创造未来的更广泛全球讨论的一部分。

The people doing this work are worth knowing for their own sake. They are making works of scope and ambition equal to the great writers or filmmakers of the Cold War — people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera and Milos Forman. It is worth remembering that many of these giants of Eastern Bloc intellectual life had a limited impact for many decades. It was only when these countries began sliding into economic stagnation that ordinary people began to seek alternative ways of understanding the past as a way to assess the future.

从事这项工作的人本身就值得了解。他们作品的深度和野心堪比冷战时期那些伟大的作家和导演，比如亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴、米兰·昆德拉和米洛斯·福尔曼。值得记住的是，在好几十年时间里，东欧知识界的许多巨擘影响力都是有限的。只有当这些国家开始陷入经济停滞，老百姓为了给未来一个预期，才会开始寻求其他理解过去的办法。

Some of China’s counterhistorians simply treat their work as time capsules. They know their work will probably not be freely available in China in the near future, but like generations of Chinese historians they believe that in the end justice prevails — that one day their work will matter. They want future Chinese people to know that in the 2020s, when the party seemed to have successfully turned back the clock, Chinese people inside China did not succumb to comfort or fear. They kept writing and filming. Not everyone gave in.

一部分中国的反正史学家干脆将自己的工作视为时间胶囊。他们很清楚，自己的作品在可预见的将来都不太可能在中国自由传播，但和一代代中国历史学者一样，他们相信正义终将得到伸张，总有一天他们的作品将具备重要价值。他们希望未来的中国人知道，在2020年代，当党似乎成功地将时钟倒拨，中国的人民没有屈服于慰藉或恐惧。他们继续写作和拍摄。并非所有人都选择认输。

But many others have a shorter time horizon. They believe that for all of its power, the Chinese Communist Party is vulnerable today.

但还有很多人相信，黎明前的黑暗不会那么漫长。他们认为，尽管大权在握，但如今的中共十分脆弱。

As China transitions from decades of ever-increasing prosperity to an era of slow growth and demographic challenges, many Chinese people appear eager for new ways of understanding their country. The government’s handling of the Covid pandemic — harsh lockdowns that resulted in deaths and misery, followed by a sudden easing of restrictions that left as many as a million dead in just a couple of months — punctured the party’s image of ruthless competency. VPN technology has long allowed people to bypass China’s firewall, but relatively few bothered; now many use VPNs to seek out banned sites.

随着中国从几十年来不断增长的繁荣过渡到增长缓慢和面临人口挑战的时代，很多中国人似乎都渴望从新的角度了解他们的国家。政府对新冠疫情的处理——严酷封锁导致了死亡与苦痛，随后突然放松管制又在短短几个月内造成至多达百万人死亡——让党无往不利的形象完全破灭。VPN技术长期以来都可以绕过中国的防火墙，但愿意忍受麻烦的人相对较少；现在，许多人都会使用VPN来浏览被封禁的网站。

For Jiang Xue, who often posts on websites blocked in China, this means new readers who are drawn to her work. She sees her articles often converted to image files, which can more easily be posted on Chinese social media because the state’s software has a harder time reading the files and picking out sensitive words and phrases.

对于作品总被中国网站屏蔽的江雪来说，这意味着会有新读者被她的作品所吸引。她发现自己的文章经常被转换成图片文件，这样就可以更容易发到中国的社交网络上，因为国家机器难以读取这些文件并识别出敏感词。

Just after New Year’s Day 2023, a few weeks after a wave of protests across China helped force the government to drop its draconian policy of pandemic lockdowns, Jiang Xue published one of her most popular articles. She addressed the hundreds of young people who had led the protests late last year. “Because of you, the suffering that the people have endured over the past three years of the pandemic dictatorship has taken on some meaning,” she wrote. “It is by speaking out loud and clear what is in your hearts that you have won a little dignity for the beaten-down and enslaved masses.” The article was posted on a blocked site but was quickly posted and reposted on Telegram, WeChat and other platforms. She received dozens of emails and messages from people in China thanking her for her work.

2023年元旦刚过，在中国各地的抗议浪潮迫使政府放弃严厉的疫情封控政策后不久，江雪发表了她最受欢迎的文章之一。她问候了去年年底那群引领抗议活动的年轻人。“因为你们，疫政三年，人们承担的苦难仿佛才有了一丝意义，”她写道。“是你们，大声喊出心里的话，为所有被损害与被奴役的人赢得了一丝尊严。”这篇文章发在了一个被封禁的网站上，但很快就被发布和转发至Telegram、微信等其他平台。她收到了大量中国民众发来的感谢邮件和信息。

As Jiang Xue pursues her calling, she is often asked if her work has any real meaning. Once while we were traveling in the mountains south of Xi’an, she told me a story about a meeting she had a few years ago in New York City. She had met a prominent journalist who left his profession, fled to the United States and was running a restaurant. He told her that her work had a moral value but practically was irrelevant. What good could she really achieve by writing about Chinese history?

在追求使命的过程中，江雪经常被问到自己的作品是否真有任何意义。有次我们前往西安南部的山区时，她给我讲了几年前她在纽约一次聚会上的遭遇。她遇到了一位著名记者，当时他已经离开这个行业，逃到了美国，经营着一家餐厅。他告诉她，她的作品有道德价值，但实际上还是无关紧要的。写中国历史能写出什么结果呢？

As she told me the story, her eyes were downcast, and she shook her head slowly, as if defeated. But then she stopped, gathered herself and spoke with surprising finality.

在向我讲述此事时，她眼睛低垂，慢慢摇头，仿佛被打败了一样。但随后她停了下来，整理思绪，以出乎意料的决绝口吻说道：

“But I disagree,” she said. “It matters if you try. I want to be a normal person in an abnormal society.”

“但我不同意，”她说。“只要尝试了就有意义。我想在一个不正常的社会里做一个正常人。”

The success of people like Jiang Xue is not preordained. They will grow old, die, possibly be arrested or fade away. But if the history of this movement has taught us anything, it is that it has grown with time, despite setbacks. We can look at individual battles and see defeat. But we can also see an endless cycle of creation, of new sparks that leap off the flint of history every time it is struck.

对于江雪这样的人来说，前方等待的不一定是成功。他们会老去、死亡，可能会被逮捕或被遗忘。但如果说这场运动的历史教会了我们什么的话，那就是尽管遭遇了挫折，它还是在随着时间推移发展壮大。个人的斗争可能失败。但我们仍可以看到创作的无限循环，新的星火就在历史燧石的每一次敲击中不断迸发出来。