And yet, as Ian Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future” (Oxford), the publication has had an afterlife of great importance. Its title was based on a common Chinese expression: “A single spark can start a prairie fire.” 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—he calls them “underground historians”—looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies and, indeed, anyone who pricked his paranoia.
torsdag 19. september 2024
How China’s underground historians have fought the politics of amnesia
Spark was not much of a magazine. Handwritten and mimeographed secretly with a primitive machine at a sulfuric-acid plant in a remote region of central China, the publication began in 1960 and never went beyond two issues. The first was hardly more than a poem and a few articles, critical of Mao Zedong’s ongoing Great Leap Forward campaign. The young men and women involved in the venture were arrested in the fall of 1960, and some of the contributors were executed as “counter-revolutionaries” after spending years in prison under horrifying conditions. Spark was read by very few people.
And yet, as Ian Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future” (Oxford), the publication has had an afterlife of great importance. Its title was based on a common Chinese expression: “A single spark can start a prairie fire.” 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—he calls them “underground historians”—looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies and, indeed, anyone who pricked his paranoia.
And yet, as Ian Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future” (Oxford), the publication has had an afterlife of great importance. Its title was based on a common Chinese expression: “A single spark can start a prairie fire.” 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—he calls them “underground historians”—looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies and, indeed, anyone who pricked his paranoia.
