纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英星火书评让中国历史不再被遗忘

SPARKS: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson

《星火：中国的地下历史学家和他们为未来的斗争》(SPARKS: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future)，作者：张彦(Ian Johnson)

By now, it is almost clichéd to compare political misrule to the dystopia that Orwell conjured through the story of the low-ranking functionary Winston Smith in “1984,” but so many aspects of the novel have come true in today’s China — from mass surveillance to fury-inciting demagogy to President Xi Jinping’s declaration that the Communist Party’s rule is “the conclusion of history” — that it may appear to preclude, as it ultimately did for Smith, the possibility of resistance.

现在，将暴政与奥威尔的小说《1984》通过低级公务员温斯顿·史密斯的故事展现出来的反乌托邦进行比较几乎已是老生常谈，但小说中的许多构想已在当今的中国成为现实：从大规模监控到煽动狂暴的蛊惑民心之举，再到国家主席习近平宣称的中共统治是“历史的结论”。这种统治也许看来排除了抵抗的可能性，就和史密斯的下场一样。

Smith’s first act of betrayal was to document a past that dared to deviate from propaganda. His second — and far more fatal one — was his attempt to find other people with a similarly impractical interest in preserving the unauthorized past. These twin offenses also drive the cast of characters in Ian Johnson’s “Sparks,” an intimate and compelling portrait of China’s underground history movement.

史密斯的第一个背叛行为是记录一个敢于偏离宣传的过去。他的第二个——也是更致命的那个——是他试图寻找其他对保存未经授权的历史有着同样不切实际兴趣的人。这两个紧密结合的罪行也是驱动张彦的《星火》中众多人物的动力，该书对中国的地下历史运动进行了详尽且引人入胜的描绘。

Johnson’s book takes its title from Spark, a journal cobbled together in 1960 by a band of exiled university students who had been sent to the same labor camp in the late 1950s after offering minor criticisms of the party. Many of them were loyal Communists. They soon began to recognize, to their horror, that the party was not erecting a utopian state so much as a brutally totalitarian one.

张彦的书名取自《星火》杂志，该杂志是被下放劳动的大学生在1960年用简陋的方法制作的，这些大学生因在20世纪50年代末对中共提出了一些轻微的批评意见而被送进同一个劳改营。他们中的许多人曾是忠诚的共产主义者。令他们惊恐的是，他们很快开始认识到，中共正在建立的不是一个乌托邦国家，而是一个残酷的极权主义国家。

The journal’s brief run — the group published only two issues — would cost several of its founders their lives but it was also real proof of something the fictional Smith never lived to see: an alliance of truth-seekers who were capable, however briefly, of making something larger than themselves.

该杂志存在的时间很短，只出版了两期，但其中几位创办人为此付出了生命的代价，它以事实证明了虚构人物史密斯从未见识过的事情：不管成果多么短暂，一个探求真相者的联盟可以创作出比他们本身更不朽的东西。

What is the meaning of individual and collective memory in a political ecosystem predicated upon the warping of the past? Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent more than two decades reporting in China, is cleareyed about the stranglehold of Chinese authoritarianism that has only tightened in the Xi era, and so are the courageous filmmakers, journalists and intellectuals whose life stories he traces.

在一个以扭曲历史为基础的政治生态系统中，个人和集体记忆有什么意义？获得过普利策奖的记者张彦在中国做了20多年的报道，对于中国威权主义的限制在习近平时代日益加强，他有着清醒的认识，同样，他笔下那些勇敢的电影制片人、记者和知识分子也是如此。

There is Lin Zhao, the propagandist turned counterrevolutionary whose verses (“Freedom, I cry out inside me, freedom!”) inspired the creation of Spark, which takes its title from a Chinese idiom, xinghuo liaoyuan, meaning “a single spark can start a prairie fire”; for the crime of criticizing Mao Zedong’s government, she would be imprisoned and executed in the 1960s, during the height of the Cultural Revolution. There is Hu Jie, the independent filmmaker who would make a documentary about Lin entitled “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul” 36 years after her death. There is the journalist Jiang Xue, who would watch the documentary and whose lengthy magazine articles on Spark in the 2010s kept the memory of the publication and its founders alive and in circulation. And there is the contemporary film critic Cui Weiping, who would read Lin’s writing half a century later and say, “Now we finally have our genealogy” — a genealogy, that is, of relentless resistance.

比如林昭，她曾是中共的宣传员，后来成了反革命，她的诗句（“自由！我的心叫道：自由！”）启发了《星火》杂志的创刊，杂志的名字取自“星火燎原”，即“星星之火，可以燎原”。林昭因批评毛泽东政府而入狱，并在20世纪60年代文化大革命最激烈的时期被处以死刑。还有独立电影人胡杰，他在林昭去世36年后拍摄了一部关于林昭的纪录片《寻找林昭的灵魂》。还有看过这部纪录片的记者江雪，她在2010年代发表的有关《星火》的长篇文章让人们对那份杂志及其创始人的记忆继续存在下去，并得以流传。还有当代影评人崔卫平，她在半个世纪后读了林昭的作品后说：“因为您，我们有了自己的谱系”——一个不停抵抗者的谱系。

In a dictatorial regime, access to the past is so tightly policed that, even for those brave enough to look, history is oftentimes unearthed unexpectedly, partially and only through happenstance. After her father died, the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser found the negatives of 400 photos that he had taken during the Cultural Revolution. “When she held them up to the light,” Johnson writes, she saw “people being humiliated and beaten” and “zealots destroying Tibetan temples.” Her father had annotated the pictures but never told his daughter about them.

独裁政权对历史材料的控制如此之严，以至于哪怕是对那些有着足够勇气的寻找者来说，历史也往往是意外地、部分地、仅仅通过偶然事件发掘出来的。西藏作家茨仁唯色在父亲去世后发现了他在“文革”期间拍摄的400张照片的底片。“当她拿起底片放到光下看时，”张彦写道，她看到了“人们遭受羞辱和殴打”、“狂热分子摧毁西藏寺庙”的场景。父亲给这些照片作了注释，但从未告诉过女儿。

The writer Yang Xianhui was barely a teenager in the late 1950s when Mao’s purges sent political prisoners to work and die in Jiabiangou, the most notorious labor camp in China. Years later, working on a collective farm in the countryside nearby, he began to hear about the survivors. After gathering more than 100 interviews, he crafted lightly fictionalized versions of some of their stories and eventually published them in 2000.

20世纪50年代末，当毛泽东的清洗运动将政治犯送到中国最臭名昭著的劳改农场夹边沟做苦工直到死亡时，作家杨显惠还只是个十几岁的孩子。多年后，他在附近农村的一个集体农场工作时，开始听到有关幸存者的故事。在进行了100多次采访后，他写了一本只是把幸存者的一些故事做了轻度虚构的书，并最终在2000年将其出版。

“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage,” Smith believed at the outset of “1984.” But the underground historians Johnson profiles knew as well as Orwell that sanity can hardly be preserved in a world without transmission and exchange of voices and vision, through both space and time. Desperate and alone, Smith struggled to find sense. As the perverse machinations of the state became increasingly clear, he scribbled in his journal, “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”

“用不着让旁人听到你，只消坚持心智健全，便是延续了人类的传统，”史密斯在《1984》一书开始的时候曾相信。但张彦记述的地下历史学家们和奥威尔一样知道，在声音和思想都无法在空间和时间中传递交流的世界里，人很难保持理智。绝望且孤独的史密斯难以找到理智。随着国家的邪恶阴谋变得越来越明显，他在日记中写道：“我懂得怎样做：我不懂为什么。”

Johnson’s book makes a potent argument for how the “why” can be understood. Only when a collective of like-minded citizens are able to see the story of how they have been individually silenced and punished can they begin to address the question of why the system of oppression exists in the first place. “I want to be a normal person in an abnormal society,” the journalist Jiang Xue tells Johnson. “I want to be able to say truthful things and express what’s in my heart.”

张彦的书对怎样理解“为什么”提供了强有力的论点。只有当一群志同道合的公民能看到他们个人如何被压制和受惩罚的故事时，才能开始了解压迫制度为什么得以存在的问题。“我想在一个不正常的社会中做一个正常的人，”记者江雪对张彦说。“我希望能说真话，表达我的内心想法。”

For Jiang, as for the others in “Sparks,” the hard-won realization rarely gives way to delusional optimism. In an influential essay from 1996, the cultural critic Wang Xiaobo explains that his reluctance to speak makes him a member of what he calls “the silent majority” in China. “I could not trust those who belonged to the societies of speech,” Wang wrote. But that is exactly why “I have a duty to speak of what I have seen and heard.”

对江雪和《星火》一书中的其他人来说，来之不易的清醒很少让位于乐观的妄想。文化评论家王小波在1996年发表的一篇颇具影响力的文章中描述了自己不愿发声，成了他所说的中国“沉默的大多数”的一员。“无法再相信任何一个属于社会话语圈的人，”王小波写道。但这正是他为什么“有义务谈谈自己的所见所闻”的原因。

Wang’s words explain the efforts of Tan Hecheng, an editor who stumbled onto the story of a party-led massacre in Hunan Province in 1967 that took the lives of 9,000 innocents. Tan devoted 40 years of his life to researching the story of the systemic murders, finally publishing a book called “The Killing Wind” in 2010. “Documenting this wasn’t quixotic,” Johnson writes. “It was a hard-nosed calculation that it would pay off — not for Tan personally but for his country.”

王小波的话解释了编辑谭合成的努力。他偶然发现了一个故事：湖南省曾在1967年发生了一场中共领导的大屠杀，夺走了9000名无辜者的性命。谭合成用了40年的时间来研究这些系统性谋杀，最终在2010年出版了一本名为《杀人风》的书。“记录这些不是想入非非，”张彦写道。“而是出于一个顽强的计算，这样做会有回报——不是为谭合成个人，而是为了他的国家。”

A decade ago, the filmmaker Ai Xiaoming traveled 1,500 miles from her home in Wuhan to record an effort by aging camp survivors to erect a tombstone where the labor camp stood. The footage is captured without a tripod and the camera work is jerky. “It could be seen as amateurish,” Johnson writes. “But for Ai and other underground filmmakers it is a sign of authenticity.”

十年前，电影制片人艾晓明从她在武汉的家出发，长途跋涉2400公里去记录劳改营的老年幸存者在劳改营原址建一个墓碑的努力。这段视频的拍摄没有使用三脚架，摄像机的操作有点晃动。“这可能被视为业余制作，”张彦写道。“但对于艾晓明和其他地下电影制作人来说，这是真实性的标志。”

Centuries from now, someone might find Ai’s shaky underground filmmaking on a hard drive or in the cloud. “And that person will try to figure out what it was used for,” Johnson muses. “Could the film itself be a kind of cemetery that people in the 21st century built to commemorate their dead?” Certainly, it could be that. It might also serve as a solitary spark, preserved in space and time, one that could ignite a prairie fire.

几个世纪后，有人可能会在一个硬盘或云端存储器上找到艾晓明晃动的摄影机拍下的地下电影。“那个人将试图弄清楚拍这部片子的目的，”张彦若有所思地写道。“这部电影本身会成为21世纪的人们为纪念死者而打造的某种墓地吗？”当然有这种可能。它或许还是保存在空间和时间中的孤立星火，可能将点燃燎原之势。

SPARKS: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future | By Ian Johnson | Illustrated | 381 pp. | Oxford University Press | $27.95

 《星火：中国的地下历史学家和他们为未来的斗争》，作者：张彦(Ian Johnson)，含插图，381页，牛津大学出版社出版，售价27.95美元