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Alternative to beyond compare11/7/2023 ![]() Many people born in China after 1989 have never heard of the Tiananmen massacre. Official Party history, imposed on China’s population, is also a matter of official forgetting. But Johnson’s underground historians are mostly concerned with unearthing and keeping alive forbidden memories of the past. There are plenty of contemporary problems that one can’t safely discuss in China, especially when they involve important officials. (Addressing this taboo subject also landed the artist Ai Weiwei in trouble.) None of this work can be released in China. Other films of hers show how shoddy school construction, permitted by corrupt Party officials, led to the deaths of many thousands of children in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. In 2006, she made “The Epic of the Central Plains,” a documentary about poor villagers who sold their blood for food and got infected with H.I.V. Johnson also turns to lesser-known figures, such as Ai Xiaoming, a former professor of Chinese literature, with a focus on women’s studies, whose admiration for Milan Kundera and experiences during the Tiananmen protests, in 1989, fed her growing skepticism about the official Party line. Since the dead bodies had little flesh, the men would cut out and consume the lungs and other innards. One of his films, titled “The Ditch” (2010), depicts the lives and the horrible deaths of political prisoners in a forced-labor camp, in 1960, when extreme hunger compelled men to eat the starved corpses of their fellows. There are other underground historians who remain active, notably Wang Bing, whose films have won many prizes at international festivals. Eventually, her head was wrapped in a hood of artificial leather, with just a slit for her eyes and nose, so that she could barely breathe, let alone speak. ![]() Alone in a cell (rubber-walled, to stop her from killing herself), when she wasn’t shackled to a chair and beaten by guards, she wrote poems on scraps of paper by piercing her finger with the sharpened end of a toothbrush and using her blood as ink. Arrested in the fall of 1960, Lin was tortured in prison for having written poetry that expressed her yearning for freedom. A poet named Lin Zhao, who contributed to Spark, was the subject of a film Hu released in 2004, titled “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul.” By interviewing people who had known her, Hu kept her legacy alive. One name that recurs throughout “Sparks” is Hu Jie, an Army veteran and a visual artist, whose documentary films focus on forgotten victims of various murderous policies. If their conclusions-presented in homemade videos, mimeographed sheets, and underground journals-didn’t reach a wide audience when they appeared, they were at least on record, for later generations.įor some underground historians, the crucial work has been to preserve the legacy of previous chroniclers and witnesses. They often paid for their candor with long prison terms, torture, or death. 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. 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. Spark was read by very few people.Īnd 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. 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. The first was hardly more than a poem and a few articles, critical of Mao Zedong’s ongoing Great Leap Forward campaign. 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.
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