The Guardian - China-Sparks by Ian Johnson review Chinas underground historians
November 1, 2023 4 min 704 words
这篇报道介绍了Ian Johnson的新书《Sparks》，着重探讨了中国的“反史学家”，他们通过各种媒介记录中国的真实历史，而这些历史常常与官方叙事不同。这个话题非常有深度和挑战性，因为中国政府对官方叙事要求绝对控制，禁止历史的否定。这是一本令人满意的书，因为它只有在经过几十年对中国的深入了解后才能写成。作者通过描述中国“反史学家”和他们的坚韧不拔，展现了他们的道德感驱使着他们，而不是经济自身利益。这些反史学家执着地继续工作，尽管政治、地理和语言上的困难。 这篇报道本身也反映了中国的历史与记忆问题，以及反史学家的重要性。它强调了在中国尤其重要的历史话语权争夺，以及一些坚定不移的个人，他们为了记录历史真相，甚至不惜被禁止离开国家。这种勇气和坚持对于维护历史记忆和道德责任感是至关重要的。 总的来说，这篇报道引人深思，突出了中国历史与权力之间的复杂关系，以及那些坚守历史真相的人所面临的挑战。它还强调了历史与文化之间的关联，对中国的深刻理解，以及对这些“反史学家”的尊重。这本书似乎为了维护历史的真实性而不懈努力，值得读者深入探讨。
Those looking for horrors in China’s recent past have no shortage of examples to choose from: the 1967 massacre of more than 9,000 people by Communist party cadres in Dao County, who threw the bodies of “class enemies” into a river to decompose; the starvation and cannibalismof thousands of prisoners at Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu, in the late 1950s. For many, however, the struggle is being allowed to remember that such events happened at all.
Memory is a compelling and slippery topic for students of China. Books such as Tania Branigan’s Red Memory have demonstrated how even people who lived through the Cultural Revolution struggle to make sense of what their memories are actually telling them. And the government demands total control over the official narrative: China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has warned against “historical nihilism” and believes the collapse of the Soviet Union came about because people were allowed to question, and lose faith in, the party’s version of the past.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson tackles this difficult subject via China’s “counter-historians” who, through various mediums including documentary, fiction and even woodcuts, feel compelled to create a record of China as they see it.
Take Ai Xiaoming, a feminist scholar and documentary maker in her 70s, who has spent much of her adult life making films about topics that the authorities would rather people forget, such as the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, where government failings contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. Her biggest project is a five-part epic about Jiabiangou. Ai interviewed Si Jicai, one of the survivors, who recalled eating the remains of his fellow inmates. For her efforts, Ai has been banned from leaving China, but remains undeterred in her film-making.
A more poetic title for Johnson’s book might have been jianghu, which in Mandarin means “rivers and lakes”, but can also refer to the righteous bandits who have historically populated ungovernable parts of the country. For millennia China’s lush backwaters were home to rogues and hermits who refused to be governed by the emperor of the day. Johnson’s skill lies in demonstrating the philosophical links between China’s geography and its political and cultural landscape. Just like the jianghu, the counter-historians are stubbornly ungovernable. They are driven by a sense of morality rather than economic self-interest.
In fact, his book takes its title from a tiny magazine that had a short but heroic run in 1960, and is the subject of a film, available on YouTube, by renowned documentary maker Hu Jie. The magazine was published by a small group of students who had grown disillusioned with the failings of the Communist party. They were sentenced to decades in prison and, in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution a few years later, two were executed.
Despite their untimely ends, these student publishers had an outsized impact on later generations of historians. Johnson argues that the work of their devotees, including Hu, Ai and thousands of writers, film-makers and artists who question the state, will be difficult to extinguish. Beijing is estimated to spend as much on domestic security as it does on national defence, but still China’s underground historians continue to work.
It is deeply satisfying to read a book about China that could only have been written after decades of serious engagement with the country. As the veteran China-watcher Perry Link put it recently, Johnson “writes entirely from the indigenous side of the seam”. Better yet to consume the works of these Chinese counter-historians directly, and Johnson closes the book with a plea to readers to engage with his subjects, despite the political, geographical and linguistic challenges.
After all, as Hu tells Johnson, China’s previous historians “weren’t afraid to die. They died in secret, and we of succeeding generations don’t know what heroes they were … If we don’t know this, it is a tragedy.”
Amy Hawkins is the Guardian’s senior China correspondent.