Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Ian Johnson.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, brought to you by The China Project. Subscribe to The China Project to get the early-release ad-free version of this podcast every week and, of course, to get our daily newsletter, the best way there is really to stay informed about China. You’ll also have access to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It is a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
If you like this podcast, you will love our next China event on November 2nd in New York with a special VIP evening featuring a live Sinica Podcast on November 1st. It’s going to be a night and a day of the most interesting and informative discussions on China that you will hear this year, and really great networking opportunities as well. Please come introduce yourself to me, and I will talk more about this before recommendations. Speaking of live Sinica Podcasts, the last one we did was a while ago now in New York, back in January, when Jeremy Goldkorn and I chatted with our good friend, Ian Johnson, at the Rizzoli Bookstore. At the end of that conversation, Ian gave us a little tease about his new book, which he had just finished up back then. That book is out now, or out very soon, on September 26th, and it’s called Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.
Ian joins me today to talk about his very powerful and quite enjoyable book. Enjoyable in the sense that it’s really well written and well structured with a lot of compelling characters, but if reading accounts of death by starvation and cannibalism and savage beatings tends to affect your sleep, maybe keep your copy on your desk or your coffee table and not on your nightstand. It does take an unblinking look just as its subjects do in their own work at some of the darkest periods and places in China’s modern history — the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward famine, labor camps, the Cultural Revolution, crackdowns in Tibet, the lockdown in Wuhan, and more. I have been looking forward to talking with Ian about this for quite some time.
Ian is a veteran China journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was with the Wall Street Journal back when I met him in the late ’90s or so, and the New York Times for many years. He has written extensively for the New York Review of Books and for the New Yorker, and he’s the author of many books, including The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, which we talked to him about on this show, which is about religion in the P.R.C., and Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China, about ordinary Chinese citizens who’ve taken on the massive state apparatus. He is now a senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ian Johnson, welcome back to Sinica. Congrats, man, on the new book.
Ian Johnson: Well, it’s my pleasure to be here again. And yeah, I’m really excited about the book.
Kaiser: I’m also excited to have you at our conference. You just confirmed that you’ll be on one of our panels at the conference.
Ian: Yeah, that’ll be a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to that.
Kaiser: I’m so psyched that you can come. Anyway, let’s jump into the book. This is a book about underground historians. So, not surprisingly, you talk quite a bit about the importance to the Chinese state, and whether we’re talking about imperial dynasts or the Communist Party state of controlling historical narratives, I doubt there are many people who are listening to this show who haven’t been exposed to the idea that controlling what people know about the past and how they interpret it, the moral of the story, the lessons of history and whatnot, was and remains very important to Chinese rulers from Qin Shi Huang on down. Not just control, but also understanding of history. Tang Taizong famously said, “With history as a mirror, one may understand the rise and fall of nations.” But that idea is hardly alien to other civilizations, nations or societies, right?
We see Putin in one obvious example when he is seeking to justify his war of aggression in Ukraine on the basis of his perverse version of history. But it’s there in our language too — History is written by the winners and all sorts of adages and euphemisms, but even in our liberal societies where you’re not going to get locked up or exiled or executed for challenging our own kind of foundational historical beliefs, it is not something that one undertakes lightly either, i.e., Nikole Hannah-Jones. Would somebody reading your book and coming away thinking that this is a particularly Chinese phenomenon or a Chinese concern, would they be correct in this way of thinking?
Ian: Well, I think that history, as you say, matters in many societies, even in the country where I’m now living, in the United States, where we’re still debating issues from the late Ming Dynasty, such as the introduction of slavery, which was the 1619 Project. This is still a vital issue that people talk about. We’re still debating stuff that would’ve taken place in the Great Leap Forward, or the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in other words, the Civil Rights movement from the ’50s and ’60s. For example Roe vs. Wade.
Kaiser: Tail end of the Cultural Revolution. Yeah.
Ian: I think sometimes people say, “Well, that’s all in the past in China. It doesn’t really matter.” But it is really important in many countries. In China, it does have residence because, I don’t want to step on a landmine here, but arguably it is the longest continuous civilization where people at least have a memory and are able to read documents going back hundreds of years. We all know that in the past, dynasties would write the previous dynasty’s history, usually as a morality lesson about why that dynasty collapsed and why the new dynasty had to take over. It’s been a sacred calling in China ever since, at least Sima Qian and on and on. So, it does have a special resonance, and I think probably also the role of communism, which has this historical determinism that the world is moving inexorably toward, from slave society to feudal society, to capitalist society, to socialism, to communism.
Those things underlie a lot of what goes on in China today, even if at the end of the day, you could simply say, “Well, it’s simply an authoritarian state that wants to justify its rule, and therefore they do it. But as you said, it’s probably true of many phenomena in society. Everything is present, in every society, it’s just in different mixes and to different degrees, right? In China, this is a pretty pronounced idea, but it’s not unique.
Kaiser: Thank God we, in the West, are free of this teleology that would think that we’re moving inexorably toward the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. Nobody would ever say that. Right?
Ian: No.
Kaiser: The book introduces the reader to a number of people that you call ‘counter-historians’ or ‘underground historians’ as in the title. We meet documentary filmmakers. We meet anthropologists, citizen journalists who aren’t perhaps familiar already to most of our listeners, but we also have lots of better-known figures like the writer, Fang Fang. We’ve talked about her on this show in the context of the Wuhan lockdown. Or the late writer Wang Xiaobo whose Golden Age is one of the first things that I tried to read when I had enough Chinese. It defeated me, but I could see that it was interesting.
Let’s take a look at some of the characters who you focus on and give the listeners a sense of who they are. Let’s start with maybe one of the two main characters who threads pretty much through the whole book, Ai Xiaoming, the documentary filmmaker and activist. Actually, I think probably one of the better-known activists of recent decades. So, tell me about Ai Xiaoming.
Ian: Ai Xiaoming is the granddaughter of a famous KMT general who led the ill-fated defense of Nanjing. He was given this suicide mission, basically by Chiang Kai-shek when Chiang Kai-shek realized it wasn’t a defensible city. It was after the city fell and, of course, the horrible massacre happened, he retreated to his native Hunan province, where he ran an academy. In any case, his daughter married an Air Force flyer, then he died and she remarried again, and their daughter was Ai Xiaoming. Ai Xiaoming was born, I should know this off the top of my head, I believe in 1953, so she was the product of New China. Her name basically means Bright Dawn, which is one of these typical names that people got in that optimistic era.
She grew up in a household where politics was always present, but best not spoken about because of her grandfather. Although he stayed on, he didn’t go to Taiwan, he was in the end still a KMT general. She was sort of this blood lineage being tainted. This came out then in the Cultural Revolution when her granddad was arrested, thrown into house arrest or some sort of prison and died there about 1970. She denounced her parents in good fashion, and she tried to keep her head down. In the ‘60s and ’70, she was allowed to go to one of the early farmer military universities, the 工农兵 (Gōngnóng bīng) universities. She didn’t really get involved that much in politics, but she was there. She was in Beijing in 1989. She was teaching, by this time, she was the first woman after the Cultural Revolution to get a Ph.D. in Chinese literature.
She was teaching in Beijing and decided not to get involved in ’89. Instead, she kept her head down, and also I think she’d seen a lot of these student movements and so on. She was a little bit concerned. She went down, afterwards, to Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, 中山大学 (Zhōngshān Dàxué). She taught there in the freer atmosphere, and got really interested in feminism. She spent one year, I believe it was 1996 to ‘97, at the University of the South.
Kaiser: In Tennessee.
Ian: Yeah, in Tennessee. She began to borrow films. She really got interested in films and dramas. Every day, she’d go to the school library and borrow a couple of films and stay up too late at night watching them, studying how films were made. It became a very, very serious hobby for her. At the same time, she encountered The Vagina Monologues, which was very big; still, it was a pretty big theatrical production, but back then it was sort of new. She came back to China and she had her class perform it. She had her students perform it. Then she called her old friend Hu Jie, who is a documentary filmmaker, a very prominent person. He shows up in my book quite a bit. He’s not one of the main, main characters, but she had him come down and do a documentary film about her students making The Vagina Monologues.
Watching him work, she thought, “You know, I can do this too.” Because this is now, maybe this is one of the key points of my book. In some ways it’s sort of a simple point, but overlooked, I think, the early digital technologies such as digital cameras and those kinds of things. They made it possible for people to film in a much easier way. We take this for granted now. Our iPhones are infinitely better than even those cameras back then. But you didn’t need to have a big roll of film and a big camera on a tripod, and then have the film developed at some store and stuff like that, and cut in a production studio. You could just film it on your handheld camera, and as the years went on, they got better and better, right? You have image stabilization software, and you can just cut it all on your laptop.
So, she thought, “I can do this.” And she began to branch out and make short documentary films, the 20, 30-minute things about events in her neck of the woods down there in Guangdong province, such as the Wukan farmers revolution strike, the rape of a young woman that made national news. She began to leave the purely academic pursuits of textual analysis, which is what she did. She was a translator of Kundera earlier on, and just more say purely academic feminist issues, and became more of an activist.
Kaiser: Yeah. Already, very early on, she’s taking on topics that she knows are sort of in the verboten category, or at least are transgressive from the perspective of authorities.
Ian: I think another key thing there is that this was probably the most open period in decades for China. People always talk about the 1980s as being the most open period when there was all kinds of intellectual debate and ferment. But that was often primarily among intellectuals and the real urban elite in a few big Chinese cities.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Ian: The internet in the 2000s, as simple as it was, and the growth of blogs and all this stuff, it made it possible for people to spread ideas. And you had a slightly more tolerant, although only temporarily so, but a more tolerant government at that time that maybe allowed this to take play.
Kaiser: 2003 to 2008. It was the end of SARS and 孙志刚 (Sūn Zhìgāng).
Ian: Yes, 孙志刚.
Kaiser: All the way up until the Olympics. I think most people who lived there during that time, and I did, and you did.
Ian: I came later, actually. I kind of missed a lot of that. I left in ’01 and didn’t really come back until ’07, ’08.
Kaiser: You were there in spirit, though. We all sort of had Ian in the air still. Anyway, let’s move her story forward a little bit. The title of your book refers to this short-lived publication called SPARK that managed, despite only having published two issues, and then just to a tiny little distribution list, it somehow survived and got preserved now digitally. This was something that she was very, very interested in and focused on, right?
Ian: Yeah. So, she made films. Her last big, big film was in a labor camp in Gansu Province, Jiabiangou. She was interested in the Anti-Righters Campaign. Out of the Anti-Righters Campaign came this group of students who were at 兰州大学 (Lánzhōu Dàxué), Lanzhou University. They were sent to the city or to villages on the outskirts of the city of Tianshui in Gansu. They saw the famine unfolding in front of them, and they thought, like a lot of people did, that, “Oh, the authorities just don’t know about this, otherwise they would do something.” One of their members, there were about 40 of the students sent from Lanzhou University, wrote a letter to his contacts in Beijing. He was a Party member, and a month later, some trucks showed up with police and they just beat the crap out of him, basically.
They thought, “Oh, I guess the authorities do know about this, but they don’t really care. So, what can we do?” And they came up with a sort of quixotic idea of let’s start a journal and publish this and send articles out to decision-makers, essentially in different cities. Some of them, they’re from different parts of China. One person was from Xi’an, another was from Guangzhou, and so on. So, he said, “Well, I know people in Guangzhou. I know people in Xi’an. We can mail it to those people.” They got a hold of a mimeograph machine, and this was actually a tribute to the local officials near Tianshui. This was very poor, these villages, and almost everyone was illiterate. The local officials thought, “Great, we’ve got all these students here. Let’s open a university where they’ll teach Chinese reading and writing to our peasants, our farmers”.
So, they were given a bit of leeway, and they were given access to the offices of the Party. We’re not talking about anything grand. This is just like a little room. But one of them had a mimeograph machine. And so they wrote up their essays and they printed it, sent it off, and basically nothing happened. Then they thought, “Things are really getting out of control. One of us should try to go abroad and try to get help.” To make a long story short, they were snapped up, thrown in jail. Three of them were executed, and the stuff laid buried in police files until the 1980s when people began to get rehabilitated. That’s when this material came to light again. So, people could look into their files. In some cases in the 1990s, one of them made photographs of everything that was in her file, everything, including letters to her lover, all the back copies of SPARK.
They’d kept everything in the police files, being a good bureaucratic state. And this just stayed in a small group of people among these survivor groups. Then came, again, digital technology, PDFs. People collated the photos into PDFs and began to circulate them and say, “Look, we found that students, 35 years ago, were grappling with the same issues that we have today.” There’s a very prominent critic in Beijing, the film critic and translator, Cui Weiping, who said, “Now we have found our genealogy. We know that there were people doing exactly the same thing decades earlier. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We realized that there have been Chinese people concerned about these issues for decades and decades since really the founding of the PRC.” That’s the creation of a collective memory. I think that I’m trying to describe in this book, one of the main themes.
Kaiser: Surely, they were aware that there were regime critics before they knew that people had been struggling against them since well before. In Yan’an, they were aware of it. It’s just that this was the emergence of SPARK and other materials. After the death of Mao and the emergence of Deng, this gave them a concrete connection to it.
Ian: I think it’s supercharged. Again, you would have a small number of people, maybe about a few thousand people in the country, in a few big cities who would be aware of this because they were in the know or whatnot. But now with the digital technologies and all this stuff spreading around throughout the 2000s, over the past 20, 25 years, you have an explosion of information about this despite government crackdowns. It’s possible just to email people stuff or give them a memory stick in ways that just wasn’t possible in the past. In the past, if you think of the term samizdat, what that originally meant, was you had sheaths of paper and carbon paper in between it, and somebody hammered out on a typewriter, a five-copy version of an essay, and then passed it to somebody else, and it was really slow.
With a PDF and email, you can send it out to hundreds of people at one time. This is indeed what one of the samizdat publications that I write about in the book, what it does. They sent, circulated to thousands of people like that.
Kaiser: This filmmaker, Ai Xiaoming, has an entrepreneur brother named Ai Luming, who is a billionaire and, not surprisingly, a Party member. That was really an interesting detail. I mean, they are scions of a prominent, well-known military hero from the anti-Japanese war. That may be part of the reason why she’s been relatively protected. What did you glean about her relationship with her brother? Is he supportive of what she does? Do they argue over it? Has he had to pay any kind of a price at all for the work that his sister does?
Ian: As far as I can tell, he hasn’t. But she really compartmentalizes her life. She doesn’t like to talk about her husband and her son and her brother. She lives in a complex, a real estate project that her brother developed. She has two houses. She’s got her family house there that she bought, and she’s got another little tiny, or she had a little tiny sort of guest house where she’d meet her dissident friends who would come over. They’d never come to her home. And she spends a lot of the time in the big family mansion, if you will, or villa, or something like that, where her father lived and she looked after him. He passed away in about 2020. She spent a lot of time looking after him in this big house. All of this was made possible by her brother, I think. But she never involves him. He’s a Party member. He does his work. When the coronavirus struck, he turned his whole company toward producing surgical masks and stuff like that.
Kaiser: There are several other characters who we could look at and I will ask you to talk a little bit about, but there is a citizen journalist, Jiang Xue, who is the other woman that you really focus on the other kind of through-line protagonist of your book. Can you talk about her a bit?
Ian: She grew up in Tianshui and went to school in Xi’an and studied law, and then she became a journalist. She never joined the Party, and her family always had a skeptical attitude toward the Party because they experienced a Great Famine directly. There’s this sort of incredible, to me at least, story of how her grandfather sacrificed himself to save the family. This was something that the family acknowledged at least once a year, at Chinese New Year when they gave him a plate of food first, and the kids had to go out visit his grave. Her father never joined the Party. She grew up skeptical of the Party. When she had her first job in 1998, she was at Huashangbao, which was, at that time, a small Xi’an-based newspaper that was aimed primarily at overseas Chinese business people.
Like a lot of the newspapers in China at that time, it became commercialized, not privatized, but commercialized. So, it’s still owned by the state and whatever obscured Danwei was in charge of that particular part of the government. But they had to make money, and they did that by becoming a hard-hitting, almost Tabloidy investigative newspaper that rushed to the scenes of accidents first and investigated misdoings. One of her mentors was this Beijing, not Beijing University, but I think the Beijing Media University, Zhenjiang professor who translated a lot of works by Pulitzer Prize-winning people and tried to sort of set standards for journalism. This is really a golden age of Chinese journalism from the late ’90s for about a decade when there was all kinds of crusading muckraking people like Hu Shuli, with Caijing that she founded, and all this kind of work that did not challenge the Party directly, but it uncovered problems in society.
She came of age in that era, but by 2013, there was a famous Southern Weekend event when Southern Weekend, which was one of these leading newspapers, always had their New Year’s editorial where they would exhort the government to engage in some sort of reform or do something positive for society. In 2013, they were stopped from doing that, and this caused a major uproar in Chinese media circles. The next year, her newspaper came in for it to tighten up, and so on, and she quit and became an independent journalist.
Kaiser: Well, she had actually written in support of the people, the editorial team at Southern Weekend who had written on constitutionalism, the exhortation that year was simply to get the Party to follow its own damn constitution.
Ian: Yeah. She was head of the op-ed or the editorial page for Huashangbao at that point. So she had a really important, sort of bully pulpit at that time. But she was demoted and she thought they were going to fire her anyway, and she decided, “I’m just going to try it on my own as an independent freelance journalist.”
Kaiser: And so off she went. We’ll come back to her story. There’s another person I’d like you to introduce to the listeners, and that’s Tan Hecheng who wrote about the massacre in Dao County, in Hunan Province that took place during the Cultural Revolution. Dao County is in Huan, on the Guangxi border, a pretty remote place. But it’s quite famous, the massacre that happened there during the Cultural Revolution, possibly because of Tan himself who covered it. I’ve encountered this before in my readings. You interviewed him six years ago for the New York Review of books, and that’s how I first read about him. But talk a little bit about him and his work and how he figures in your book.
Ian: He’s a typical example of one of these people who have what you might consider to be a wild hair up their ass. This is that they cannot really, as he puts it, ‘I can’t turn black into white’. He’s a very funny guy, quite profane. He says, “I can kiss ass as well as anybody can. I’m the world’s greatest ass-kisser. If you want me, I’ll write an article any way you want, but I somehow can’t turn black into white.” And so he was working for this literary magazine called Hibiscus in the 1980s. This was the time of Hu Yaobang, the reforming Party secretary who said, “We have to uncover these problems from the past and make amends and set things right.” There was a big investigative team that was sent down to Dao County. Tan went down as an official journalist. So he was given access to everything. By the time he got back, though, it was already the era of the, would it be the Spiritual Collusion Campaign?
Kaiser: Yeah, that was ’82. In ’86 was the anti-bourgeois liberalization.
Ian: That was bourgeois liberalization. Right. So, it was ’86 by the time he got back. And his article was put on hold. It was never going to be published. And it was funny, an editor said, “Don’t get so uptight about it. Things are going to get better and better. By the year 2000 or 2010 when you’re older, before you retire, you’ll be able to publish all this stuff.” But he didn’t listen to that advice, fortunately. Instead, he continued to go down there on his own. In summers on vacations, he went back over and over again and wrote the whole story about it, which was published in Hong Kong in many parts or many iterations of it. I think the first time he published stuff was in 2010, and then he updated it again and again and again.
The last set of updates was 2019 or so. I’ve met him on many occasions. He lives a lot of the time in Beijing. He’s one of these guys that just can’t let it go. You can say that’s a problem perhaps, but it’s also what drives many people who are sort of crusading and trying to seek justice. He’s not personally affected by this at all. His family didn’t die there. He just thought this was a problem. He felt he’d given everyone his word that he would write about this, and he did. So, he was a fascinating character. I traveled around Dao County with him, where he is kind of a celebrity in some ways, although some people think he’s great, other people hate him because he’s such a muckraker.
Kaiser: Muckraker, troublemaker. I mean, he’s sort of a Socrates-style person. Which reminds me of another character, Chen Hongguo, this Xi’an-based professor who started, I guess, at the now defunct Zhiwuzhi salon. Again, a sort of self-styled Socrates. He seems himself in that role with Taoist characteristics, I suppose. Tell us about him and the Zhiwuzhi salon.
Ian: That salon was great, and I think it’s really a pity that it was closed down because it gives you an idea of what Chinese civil society can be like. It was closed down in 2019 and was basically just a space. I always thought of it as a library, but it’s not really a library. It was just a cultural open space, a little cafe. Chen Hongguo was a law professor. After 2013, when the government promulgated this Document Nine, which limited what could be taught, including constitutionalism and things like that, he decided there’s no future for him in academics. And so he would go into public education by teaching people in this salon and holding lectures. He invited some of the best-known public intellectuals in China and all came. Anybody who’s anyone, they came and spoke in Xi’an. He had this cafe. The Zhiwuzhi, as you say, is from this Socratic paradox. I know, I know nothing.
Their logo is Socrates with a red beard. This was a meeting place for many people like that. I think that’s the kind of thing that you could see coming up again in the future when, if things, maybe when things open up again in the future.
Kaiser: You’ve spent a lot of your life dealing with people who are regime critics or dissenters or self-described dissidents, people who are taking on the system. Besides the obvious things that they have in common, like no small measure of personal bravery or courage, you can’t deny that, whatever you think of their motives or their goals, what else, from your experience, do they have in common? Do they all have that wild hair up their bum?
Ian: You mentioned Tan Hecheng. One of the interesting encounters with him, was on this bridge, Widow’s Bridge, which was built by a widow in the Ming Dynasty, or something like that, and he met the descendant of Zhou Dunyi, who’s a famous Neo-Confucian philosopher, 13 centuries, or 13 generations earlier or something like that. And the younger Mr. Zhou, he’s a guy who wanted to know what happened to his family. He’s grateful to Tan Hecheng for what he’s done and documenting everything, but he also wants to get on with his life. It was going to be, I think, the 1000th or the 1100th anniversary of Zhou Dunyi’s birth or death or something like that. And he wanted to be part of that. They were going to have a big event. And he runs a coffee shop, internet cafe type thing in a small town. And he has to get along with the Party. He can’t afford, in a way, to alienate the Party.
People like Tan, I don’t call them dissidents. I call them underground historians because a lot of them do have one foot in the system. So, Tan kept his job at Hibiscus. He just did this on the side, and he was sort of marginalized at the magazine, never promoted, never participated in any competitions or anything like that. But still, they are outsiders. They think of themselves, often another term that comes up a lot is Jianghu 江湖 (jiānghú), the Knights Errant of Ancient China, people who live by this sort of code of honor.
Kaiser: I mean, Wuxia 武侠 (wǔxiá) are those people, but Jianghu is that scene in which the Wuxia live, the milieu of the rivers and the lakes.
Ian: Yeah. The sworn brotherhoods who live there outside the law, outside this agricultural, urban-based communities of where Chinese civilization was dominant. They had their own bands of brothers. In the modern-day world, I think of them as sisterhoods also. People like Tan Hecheng and Jiang Xue and Ai Xiaoming are part of that. Many of them know each other, if not personally, at least by name and reputation, and they’ll help each other out as well.
Kaiser: I was asking about things that they have in common. It’s interesting because I do want to get back and talk about that encounter with Tan Hecheng and the descendant of the Neo-Confucian scholar on the Widow’s Bridge. I don’t know whether you read this interesting paper that Rory Truex at Princeton wrote. It’s about personality and political descent. I was wondering whether the people that you’ve dealt with exhibit the qualities he describes. He says in that paper and in a podcast that I did with him that China’s discontented citizens, just on average, tend to be pretty antisocial. They’re highly introverted. They have a pretty disagreeable personality. They’re willing to get into arguments with people all the time. They have disharmony in their social relationships.
They’re actually also more anxious and more fearful and less emotionally dependent on others. “They’re kind of lone wolf types,” he says. Rory is very, very careful to say this does not mean that all regime critics or dissidents are cantankerous sociopaths. Anyway, I ask because it was by no means clear to me that the people you profile fit this description in a particular way. A lot of them seem awfully nice. What were your impressions? Did they have that kind of misanthropic, not misanthropic, but sort of asocial personality?
Ian: You know, when you were in some ways tilting it, windmills in an authoritarian state, when you have that kind of a personality, I think you probably are a bit of a lone wolf. You’re willing to sacrifice quite a bit. In the case of Jiang Xue, the independent journalist who’s one of, as you mentioned, the through stories in my book, she paid a pretty heavy price, this is in my book as well, but her husband is a researcher at the local Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences and Religion. The thought police went to him and went to his boss and said, “You’ve got to get your wife under control because she’s publishing all this stuff.” They argued, and that was one of the key reasons why they ended up divorcing because they just had completely different views.
Kaiser: Wow.
Ian: There’s a price that people pay for that. But I don’t know. I think that many of the people, I can’t judge them all, but many of the people I wrote about, for example Ai Xiaoming, she lives a normal life, she’s kept her job at the university. Maybe in his case, it’s more the classic real dissident person who’s living off various things like Liu Xiaobo or somebody like that who’s completely outside the system. Some of the people I write about are outside the system. But I think pretty much all of them, the main thrust of them are people who have at least one foot inside the system.
Kaiser: That’s what makes it really interesting and that’s one of the important takeaways from your book. I think it’ll be surprising to some of the readers of it that they’re able to be heard at all. The state has not, in all cases, just squash them. They’ve got that anthropologist, Guo Yuhua, who has written extensively about, you know, people suffering in Yangjiagou, which is this place that’s sort of hallowed in Party history, right? In the loose plateau near the Yunnan base area. But she still kept her job at Tsinghua.
Ian: Yeah. She kept her job. I mean, she suffered in some ways.
Kaiser: No promotions.
Ian: No promotion, no campus housing or no university housing, which is a big deal in a city like Beijing.
Kaiser: Yeah, that’s true.
Ian: But her husband’s an entrepreneur and they bought some property 20-odd years ago in Huilongguan or someplace like that. So she commutes in.
Kaiser: Huilongguan is not so bad.
Ian: It used to be terrible. Now it seems like it’s not so bad.
Kaiser: I know. Back then, I remember, I lived out there in 1989 at this sort of ex-commune near this abandoned Mövenpick hotel near Huilongguan at one point while we were starting my old band. Anyway, one of the other things I’ve noticed, it’s in this book, it’s in a lot of your work, there are a number, quite a number really, of Christians. Is this because you are particularly interested in Christianity in China, some form of selection bias? Or is it that Christians are actually overrepresented in dissident communities or in sort of critical communities? Or maybe there’s something about Christianity that predisposes you, in China at least, toward descent, or maybe something about descent in China that predisposes you toward Christianity? Have you given that much thought?
Ian: Well, I have given that a thought. Now, the two main characters are not Christian, Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue.
Kaiser: But quite a few of the others are.
Ian: Chen Hongguo, you mentioned, for example, he’s a Christian. Or he calls himself a cultural Christian because he doesn’t like to go to church every Sunday or something like that. But there’s a debate about that. If you look at the rights lawyers movement, the Weiquan movement of lawyers…
Kaiser: Tons of them are.
Ian: There was a disproportionate number of them, maybe 25% or 30% or something were Christian. In all of China, the number of Christians is about 5%. But yeah, roughly 5%, say 60, 70 million. Now, why is that? There are some people hypothesizing, and you can find examples of when you are engaging in this kind of work, you need a support community, and Christian groups tend to support you, and some of them have converted after starting their work. Others will say that the separation of church and state or the idea of a higher moral authority will lead Christians then to challenge the state. It’s hard because the Christianity also says to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and so you can also make your peace with the establishment if you want to. So, I’m not sure. I think that might have been just accidental. I certainly don’t think I set out, it wasn’t the same set of people, or this isn’t like a subset of the people I researched for the Souls of China. I think it could have been accidental. I’m not really sure, to be honest, why that is.
Kaiser: Ian, you mentioned Document Number Nine, and one of the concepts in there that when they identify, I think it was like seven, ironically, we’re talking about Christianity, seven sins, right? Most of them are kind of the result of foreign influence. One of them, and I think it’s particularly relevant to your book about underground or counter historians, is this idea of historical nihilism. This idea that there are sacred interpretations of the Party’s history, of the nation’s history that they will not brook dissent from the revisionists about. What are some of those really sensitive topics? What are some of these things that the Party just gets really twisted up about?
Ian: Well, there’s a huge laundry list of these things that the authorities have come up with, including that the Long March wasn’t as long as some people claim it was, for example, or that Mao’s son was guilty. Mao’s son who died in the Korean War was guilty of own death because he was sloppy and careless. There’s something about him wanting to cook fried rice or something like that.
Kaiser: Giving away their position by cooking.
Ian: Giving away their position. There’s also a famous kind of heroic battle, guerilla battle outside south of Beijing on this peak, Lingya peak. Miraculously, these communist soldiers jumped off the peak but didn’t die. If you challenge that, which some people have, then you can be sued which is what some people did. So, there’s a whole array of things that you just can’t really challenge, or that Mao wrote a certain poem, Snow. Some people say, no, it wasn’t written by Mao, it was written by a secretary or by somebody else. These things, individually, they’re kind of ludicrous, right? Well, who cares if Mao wrote a bunch of poems, whether he wrote this poem or that poem? Or maybe his secretary did help him, just like we know Rembrandt had a studio or something like that. You know, you could argue it that way, right?
Kaiser: Sure.
Ian: But they view all these things as thin edges of a wedge that could destroy the Party’s legitimacy. As unremarkable as each claim might be, or you could say, “Oh, Long March,” okay, so it wasn’t 10,000 li, it was 9,000 or 8,000. It was still a remarkable thing, right? But once you challenge that, then you begin to say, “Well, maybe the Party wasn’t really so heroic, and maybe it turns out that a lot of the people were on opium on their Long March, and they kept concubines, and some of the leaders were carried in sedan chairs and stuff like that.” Then it’s a slippery slope once you allow these things to start. That’s why the Party has these interpretations of history that it insists on as being the sort of gospel truth.
This is why, to me, the battle for control of history is one of Xi’s signature domestic policies over the past decade-plus of his rule. He started right at the very beginning in 2013, just after taking power, he brought up the whole historical nihilism thing. He said, “You can’t negate, 你不能否定 (Nǐ bùnéng fǒudìng), you can’t negate the Mao period and/or the reform period. They’re two sides of the same coin. So, you can’t sort of say Mao was terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the famine, the Cultural Revolution, a string of disasters, because that would undermine the Party. He sort of put an end to that, and then closed off the most important counter-history journal, which his father had even endorsed, 炎黄春秋 (Yánhuáng Chūnqiū), China Through the Ages. That was a top priority for Xi as he would see it reassert control over China.
Kaiser: Right. He sees these ultimately as load-bearing walls that the whole edifice of Party control could ultimately come tumbling down, where there are enough small cracks put into it by little instances of unpunished historical nihilism, right?
Ian: Yeah. I think it’s not likely that if you show that the Long March was not so great, or that the Communist Party didn’t do this or that, the whole state isn’t going to fall down, right? But they’re always talking about culture, and the Party is always talking about ideology, Party building. They want the people on some level to believe. They know they’re not all going to believe, all the Party members and cadres especially, they know they’re not all going to believe in Lei Feng and these other model heroes or slightly improbable characters from the Party’s mythology. But they want them to believe fundamentally that this is a sacred task run by an outstanding organization that has saved China. That is important to them.
Kaiser: The problem is, of course, that they’ve sort of tied themselves to Mao and his legacy, even though, in many ways, fundamentally, they aren’t Mao and his party, or at least I would be more comfortable saying that before, say 2013. This is something I want to talk to you about. Let me get to that in a little bit because I want to ask you about this first. You’ve encountered this innumerable times doubtless in talking to ordinary Chinese people, even maybe to educated Chinese people about the work that you do, about the people who you write about. I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times. I know I have. They’ll tell you some version of, “You have to let those wounds heal. You can’t just keep opening the dressing or picking at the scab.”
I’ve heard so many variations on this. There are these ugly truths that in an ideal world, Chinese society, including its leadership, would squarely reckon with these. But we live in a less-than-ideal world, and the cost would simply not be worth the benefit of letting the truth be known. I’m sure that the underground historians that you’ve talked with over the years have heard the same thing exactly, right? I’m curious what they say and what you say to this as somebody who is giving their voices a very prominent platform in the West, and doubtless drawing a lot of fire for that.
Ian: I think a lot of them would say, well, the Party itself after the Cultural Revolution, for example, recognized that they needed to tell, to give a more complete account of the past. The party secretary I mentioned earlier, Hu Yaobang, tried to do that. So, it’s not antithetical with Party control to try to have a better, more complete accounting of the past. Xi’s own father, as I mentioned, was a supporter of this magazine that was the premier counter history magazine in China.
Kaiser: Yánhuáng Chūnqiū, yeah.
Ian: Yánhuáng Chūnqiū for 20-odd years, even gave it some calligraphy or something like that. I don’t think that they see this as necessarily against the Party per se, but that somehow there has to be a better accounting of the past in order to prevent mistakes from being made again. People might say that Xi Jinping is an example of why they need a better accounting of the past.
Kaiser: I completely agree. His stance is the perfect example of why we need better accounting. But I also have some empathy for those people who do want to get on with their lives. Do you think that there’s any danger in the lionization of regime critics? I mean, we do an awful lot of it in the West. We do it for very understandable reasons. I think it’s just in our nature. I think in the West, in America especially, we root for the underdog, right? We like to see the story in which the person who has truth on their side and justice on their side ultimately prevails against authoritarianism. That’s very natural to us. And besides these guys, their stories are really compelling.
They make really interesting reading. But they also reinforce, especially if all of their assumptions are just accepted at face value without skepticism, they reinforce a view of China, of the Communist Party that, let’s say, does not exactly lend itself to nuance. It turns into a very black-and-white thing. That’s one thing. But the other thing that I worry about, and you talked about this a little bit when we talked about the encounter between Tan Hecheng and the descendant of Zhou Dunyi on the Widow’s Bridge in Dao County. I think there is this, and I’ve seen this before, this kind of unfair expectation of heroism that’s sort of the flip side of lionizing the bold dissident. The person who doesn’t speak out, who is willing to trade little individual liberty for temporary safety, they’re thought to deserve neither liberty nor safety, and they’re viewed with something like contempt, right? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Would you say that these counter historians, the people you write on, are noteworthy because they’re so exceptional, or because you think in some way they’re representative?
Ian: I think they are exceptional people in the sense of being unusual and extraordinary. There’s a couple of ways of looking at it. When you said, “Do we always lionize the idea that we can never forget the past, that we can’t move forward?” One of my thoughts was Germany, where I lived for a long time. We think of Germany as the model place where they deal with the past and they talk about the Holocaust all the time. But that wasn’t really the case right after the war. It only really took off in the 1960s and with the 1968 student movement. Adenauer, the first very successful chancellor of Germany who gave it the stability and the prosperity, the economic wonder, the Wirtschaftswunder, he was accused of having a lot of people who had worked for the Nazi regime in his cabinet and in his government and top levels of his government.
I’m not saying that therefore that’s good, or that’s okay, but you can see that there is sometimes a need to get on with things a bit. That you can’t, as collectively as a society, wallow in the past. But also one of the points I think is, not so much that all Chinese people think like this, or there’s a hidden silent majority of people who think that there should be a reckoning with the past. It’s just to challenge people a little bit in the West who think that there is no descent in China left. And I hate to use that word descent because it really has a loaded meaning of some kind of quasi-lunatic person in a room writing treaties and stuff like that.
But that there’s no free thinking left in China. That the Party won, the surveillance state won, or that everything that you read in People’s Daily is happening across the country that Xi Jinping controls the whole show. I wanted to show that even despite all these crackdowns, there are people who are still doing things in China. Even if their numbers are not large, change always, normally, often happens in societies with small numbers of people. A hundred years ago in the United States, if you had said certain things about black people should have equality and stuff like that, many parts of society would not have agreed with you, right? Racial views were really regressive back then.
Kaiser: Or they would’ve raised arguments like you hear now that these things take time, right? Society can only move so quickly. Yeah, sure, like counsel patients. And of course, that sounds absolutely ludicrous to us now.
Ian: I think with time, these things that we’re seeing now, these people I write about in China, they could become more mainstream. It doesn’t require a democratic revolution. It could simply be that China continues down Xi Jinping’s path of tight control over society and economics. The economy slows, China gets caught in the mid-income trap; eventually Xi dies, and the Party decides, as it has in the past, to correct again and to go to a more open period. People like this, or people like them, maybe not exactly these people because who knows when this thing could happen, but that they become accepted and that their views become much more mainstream than they are now. That’s why some of the people I profile know that they’re writing for future generations of Chinese people. This work, it’s really important for them that Chinese people are researching this.
Some of the people I wrote to said, “We don’t want, for example, the Cultural Revolution to only be researched at Harvard University. There should be Chinese people in China researching the Cultural Revolution. That’s really important to us.” Those are the voices I thought were much more compelling and interesting.
Kaiser: You write in your book about some periods in which it was possible to shine a light in some of the darker corners of China’s past, especially the Cultural Revolution. And it was done with the tacit nod of the Party, right? The Party itself as it talks all the time about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. For a while, there were people who were quite prominent who were making apologies. There are many instances in this book where Mao’s death, the rise of Deng, these liberal periods that I’m talking about in the ’80s, the ’90s and the 2000s open up this space-free examination of history. It could be argued, and I think I do actually argue, that the party of Deng and of Jiang and of Hu was a fundamentally different party than Mao’s Party.
It had a different composition. Its ideological underpinnings were radically different in practice if not in theory. Its basic foreign policy orientation. This has all shifted so radically. As you said, it opened up the space for reckoning with history. But still, I can’t remember which of your characters talked about, “As long as Mao’s portrait still hangs over Tiananmen, nothing will have changed.” The portrait still hangs there. They believed that they needed to still derive legitimacy from Mao. Like Xi Jinping said, “The Reform Period and the Mao period have to be two sides of the same coin.” That means the Party is still on the hook, right? For the crimes of Mao, which is an uncomfortable position for them and, in some ways, a very kind of lamentable position because it inhibits them in so many ways. Anyway, you must have thought about this a lot. Clearly, you talked about the issues that this touches on with your subject. What’s their thinking on this?
Ian: I think for a lot of them, they certainly see the Mao era as the big problem that still hasn’t really been addressed. It’s well known, this comparison to the Soviet Union, that Khrushchev could desalinize because he had Lenin as the founding father. You could still say the revolution was good. Lenin was our founding father. Stalin took things off the rails a little bit, but we basically got rid of him. Our state is still legitimate. Mao is more problematic because he is the founding father and the guy who took the revolution off the rails. If you get rid of him, then you don’t really have any foundation left for the state. Deng tried to square that circle by saying, “Oh, the 70% good, 30% bad,” or something like that. They had this big resolution on Party history that Deng oversaw. There were many, many people in the Party at these big conferences, thousand cadres, 4,000 cadre conferences. They came to Beijing and debated stuff.
They wanted much stronger criticism about Mao, especially the Great Famine, which has just glossed over even in that resolution from 1981. And Deng just said, “No, we can’t do that. We can’t go after Mao.” I mean, his own son was probably pushed to death or jumped, not to death, but paralyzed.
Kaiser: To paralysis. Yeah.
Ian: When he fell or was pushed out of the dormitory window.
Kaiser: You don’t get to use the word “defenestration” much, so when you get the chance, just use it.
Ian: Defenestration, yeah. So, he understood that, but they had to keep Mao. I think this is still the challenge for the Party because Mao, at the end of the day, his writings and his ideology is always about struggle and always divides the world into this binary us versus them thinking. That’s not exactly an uplifting ideology that your founding father, or whatever, that he pushed. I don’t think they can get rid of him. I don’t think anybody realistically expects that to happen for decades or centuries. I mean, who knows?
Kaiser: There are so many other things that I’d love to talk to you about in this book. There’s so much on the History Museum, for example, that it’s so great. I love how you structured it with these, I don’t know what you call them, these little text boxes that are sort of the interstitial kind of anecdotes that are between the major chapters, which are just fantastic and so well chosen. But let me be respectful of your time here and ask you just one more question, which is, what would you say is the single most important thing that your book adds to our understanding of regime critics in China?
Ian: Well, I think that we have to realize that this state, currently under Xi Jinping, as powerful as it is, it has not crushed all free thought. That there’s still people in China today who are availing themselves of basic digital technologies and just person-to-person contact to keep alive a different vision of China. I will be giving a talk in New York with my interlocutor Gal Beckerman who wrote a book called The Quiet Before. It basically talks about the slow burn process of how social movements take off. They don’t take off all right away. They take off with slow person-to-person contacts. I think this is something that you can see from this book, that there is this group, tens of thousands of people, this small collective memory of a different kind of China that could be, and that they’re still at it and they’re still active.
If we’re looking for interlocutors in China, and people are always like, “Who do we talk to? We can’t talk with the Communist Party.” These are the kind of people we could be talking to more. We could be inviting them. It stuns me that there’s not been a major retrospective at a big film festival of Hu Jie, of his films. I mean, he’d made three classic documentary films. He’s made it more, but three of them are just outstanding. These kinds of things, I think we should be more aware of them. This would also give people a different view of China. There are so many people in the West who see China as this monolith with just bad commies running the show. And while there may be some truth to that, it’s important to realize that there are other people out there too, and that they’re significant in number.
They’re not all just beleaguered victims about to be arrested right away. They have agency and they’re doing interesting stuff, and we should try to engage with them. Go over, visit them, bring our university, start up university exchanges more. Especially us going there. All those things are takeaways that I put in the conclusion. And because I am working at the Council on Foreign Relations, I have to have a little bit of a policy wonk takeaway thing. That’s in the conclusion of my book as some things that we could consider as implications of these stories.
Kaiser: Ian Johnson, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me this evening. The book, once again, is called Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. And you should order yourselves a copy right now.
Ian: All right. Do it.
Kaiser: Do it. Let’s move on now to recommendations. But first, a quick announcement. I wanted to let all of our fans in the Midwest and your legion know that Sinica is coming live to you in Chicago for October 10th — double 10 Day. We are partnering with the Paulson Institute and Becker Friedman Institute China for the inaugural event of their decoding China series. Damien Ma from Macro Polo, Lizzi Lee from The China Project, and a special guest from the Becker Friedman Institute will all be doing a live podcast recording as well as a China knowledge game show in which some lucky audience members can also participate. That will be at the Booth School of Business, Gleacher Center. The event is completely free to attend, but you do need to register it through Becker Friedman Institute. You can find a link to that on our website at events.thechinaproject.com.
Right after the event, The China Project is going to be hosting a special after show dinner at a nearby Sichuan restaurant called Lao Sze Chuan, where participants can grill me and our other guests about China over some of the most delicious Chinese food that Chicago has to offer. The dinner ticket is $199 bucks. To register, please go to events.thechinaproject.com. Oh, and, of course, do not forget about our Next China conference on November 1st and 2nd in New York. The lineup is stellar, even better now that Ian Johnson is going to be joining. It’s going to be fantastic. Okay, let’s move on to recommendations. Ian, what do you have for us?
Ian: I have a couple of things really quick. The book I mentioned before by Gal Beckerman, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, where he talks about the three-stage play or the three-act play of revolutions, and how we always focus on the third act, which is when people are out in the streets doing stuff, but we really ought to focus on the first act, when links and contacts are made and the foundational work is done. I think that’s a really great book. The other thing, just on a self-promotional aspect, something that I’m launching, and it should be launched by the time this podcast is out, the target launch date is September 22nd, but it’s a new website called China Unofficial Archives. Right now we have over 800 items in the archive including books, samizdat publications, and documentary films. We have staff people working on this.
And we have some grant money. The URL is minjian, M-I-N-J-I-A-N, -danganguan. For archive, DANGANGUAN.org. We are a charitable organization. I’m doing this work, just pro bono myself. We have some staff people, web designers, some people who are obviously paid, but we’re doing this as a way to make available this amazing output of work by unofficial historians in China. Primarily it’s for a Chinese audience because the material is all in Chinese at the end of the day, right? It’ll be curated, it will have a description of each item in our holding to explain why we have it there. But I guess the main target audience is Chinese. But for Westerners, it’s interesting just to see the sheer scope, ambition of these people who have been working on this for over 75 years, this incredible sort of output. So, that’s The China Unofficial Archives Minjian Danganguan. I’m sure Kaiser will put the link on the site.
Kaiser: I sure will. And you might as well just take that visa in your passport and just rip it up at this point.
Ian: I’m just showing the diversity of China. What’s wrong with that?
Kaiser: Right. Right, right, right.
Ian: I love China.
Kaiser: Oh, excellent, excellent. We were talking a little bit ago about Germany, and I’ve been on a German literature kick of late. I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice & Other Taless. It’s a really short, kind of a more of a novella, anything, but it’s in a collection that was published I think in the ’90s. But this translation is really awesome. The translator is Joachim Neugroschel. His preface to this is just amazing, just for the exploration that he offers of the difficulties of translating German to English. Things that I had never thought about, these grammatical features of German. Ian, you speak German, so you understand. Like the fact that verbs come in at the ends of sentences and something about the way that subordinate closets work and rhyme schemes in German, in English, if you have a polysyllabic rhyme, that’s reserved for a sort of juvenile dog rule. You only do that just to be kind of cutesy and funny.
It’s never for serious poetry. Our serious poetry, when it rhymes at all, has monosyllabic rhymes, but completely the opposite in Germany. I just never really thought about these things, and it’s really fascinating. I had read The Magic Mountain, and I had never read Death in Venice, which is really kind of strange. But now I’m on that kick. I look forward to talking about German literature with you next time that we encounter one another, Ian.
Ian: Yeah. In New York at the conference.
Kaiser: Oh yeah. Ian, thank you so much. It was wonderful to speak to you, and congratulations on the book.
Ian: Thank you. It was great talking to you too, Kaiser, and thanks for having me on.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Xitter, as it’s now called, or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week, take care.
