Review on Ian Johnson's New Book: Sparks

choi

Melanie Kirkpatrick, Warriors of Remembrance; Wu Di's samizdat journal published an apology by a student who had participated in the denunciation and death of her school's vice principal.    at page C9
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... tory-today-a1752677
(book review on Ian Johnson, Sparks; China's underground historians and their battle for the future. Oxford University Press, 2023)

Note:
(a)
(i) The Scottish surname Kirkpatrick is "from either of two places in Dumfries called Kirkpatrick or any of various other places in Scotland all so named from the dedication of their church to Saint Patrick. The Scottish word kirk sometimes replaced Gaelic cill 'church' in placenames; compare Kilpatrick ." Dictionary of American Family Names. 2nd ed, by Oxford Univ Press, 2022.
(A) Take notice that kirk is Scottish and cill is Gaelic.
(B) Compare Gaelic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic
("pertaining to Gaels")
with Scottish language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_language
("may refer to:
• Scots language (Scots Leid), a Germanic language spoken in Lowland Scotland and Ulster, native to southeast Scotland
• Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), a Celtic language native to the Scottish Highlands")
(C) Dumfries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumfries
(ii) Scottish surname Kirkpatrick is found in southwestern Scotland. Irish surname Klpatrick is found in Ulster (or Northern Ireland).

Fitzpatrick is also an Irish surname.


(b)
(i) Ian Johnson (writer)  張彦
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Johnson_(writer)
(1962- ; a Canadian-born American journalist, "won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in the Wall Street Journal of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. * * * In 2020, Johnson's journalist visa was canceled amid US-China tensions over trade and the COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China. He currently lives in New York, where he is Stephen A Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations")
(ii) Hannah Arendt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
(1906 – 1975; a German-born American; "She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century")

(c) "Documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming [艾晓明 (1953- )] paints a searing portrait of China's most notorious labor camp, Jiabiangou [夹边沟(农场) 甘肃省酒泉市], situated in the unforgiving Gobi Desert from 1957 to 1961 [which straddled Great Chinese Famine 三年大饥荒 (1959 - 1961)]. * * * Wu Di [吴迪 (1951- )], co-founder [the other co-founder is 何蜀 (1948- )] of the samizdat journal Remembrance [记忆 (2008- )], which explores China's past through the lens of personal responsibility. In 2013, Remembrance addressed the politically sensitive subject of who bears responsibility for the barbarity that took place during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. It published an apology by a woman who, when she was a student at an elite high school for girls, had participated in the denunciation and murder of the school's vice principal [卞仲耘, who died on Aug 5, 1966]. She was the daughter of a famous general [宋任穷之女宋彬彬 (1949- )], and one of her classmates was a daughter of Deng Xiaoping."

samizdat (n; First Known Use 1967; etymology)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/samizdat


(d) "The inspiration for the book's title comes from a short-lived student-run journal from 1960 called Spark. The story of the magazine and the idealistic young people who ran it forms the book’s most compelling chapter. The students, who had been sent to the countryside during the Great Famine, naively believed that if they publicized the cannibalism and other horrors they observed there, the party would change its destructive land-reform policies. Spark published only two issues before the government shut it down and arrested and jailed the students. In the 2000s, documentary filmmaker Hu Jie [胡杰 (1958- )]rescued Spark from oblivion in a powerful online movie [Spark 星火 (2013)] that has now disappeared from China's websites. * * * Mr Hu's film, 'In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul [尋找林昭的靈魂 (2004)],' is available on YouTube with English subtitles."

星火 (1960年杂志)
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/星火_(1960年杂志)


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‘Even in the darkest of times,” Hannah Arendt once wrote, “we have the right to expect some illumination.” Ian Johnson presents Arendt’s comment as the epigraph to “Sparks,” and appropriately so: It sounds the great theme of his illuminating book.

For Mr. Johnson, the darkest of times for China is right now—the period since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 under a Communist Party ruled by Mao Zedong. Today, Xi Jinping’s China is an authoritarian state with an aggressive foreign policy fueled by aspirations of world dominance. The economy is flagging, the population is aging, anyone who questions the “truth” as proclaimed by the party is subject to punishment, and modern surveillance technology allows Beijing, with its giant state apparatus, to spy on its citizens more intrusively than ever. “It is easy to argue that the leviathan has won,” Mr. Johnson writes.

Instead, he offers a rare hopeful perspective. Like Arendt referring to illumination, Mr. Johnson sees “sparks” of light in the work and activism of independent thinkers who challenge the party’s inaccurate and self-protective versions of history and current events. “Thousands” of writers, journalists, memoirists, artists, filmmakers and videographers throughout China, he writes, are determined to set the record straight. They distribute their findings through digital technology that allows them to elude the party’s army of censors. Communication tools include memory sticks, passed along by hand or mailed around, as well as virtual private networks that enable people in China to access YouTube and other foreign-based websites outside the government’s tracking.

Mr. Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, spent 20 years in China reporting for several publications, including this newspaper, for which he wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the persecution of the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is outlawed in China. In “Sparks,” he reaches into his reporter’s notebooks to offer examples of men and women who are challenging the party’s self-serving versions of their country’s history. His detailed narratives sometimes can be confusing, but it’s worth the reader’s effort to persist in following the author’s accounts.

The opening section focuses on “underground” historians who are researching the Great Famine of 1959, in which an estimated 45 million people died, and the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-61, in which critics of Mao’s policies were exiled to the countryside after believing that Mao meant it when he encouraged criticism during his campaign to let a hundred flowers bloom.

Documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming paints a searing portrait of China’s most notorious labor camp, Jiabiangou, situated in the unforgiving Gobi Desert from 1957 to 1961. Ms. Ai uses a digital camera to record interviews with survivors and family members of the men and women who had been imprisoned there. Most died of starvation. Jiabiangou is one of many episodes in modern China’s violent history that the party has tried to bury.

Ms. Ai brings Jiabiangou’s story into the present day by recounting families’ successful efforts 50 years later to erect a memorial honoring the victims. The symbolism of a memorial honoring the thousands of innocent people killed by the Communist Party was too powerful for modern-day party leaders to tolerate. They ordered it destroyed.

Another underground historian profiled in “Sparks” is Wu Di, co-founder of the samizdat journal Remembrance, which explores China’s past through the lens of personal responsibility. In 2013, Remembrance addressed the politically sensitive subject of who bears responsibility for the barbarity that took place during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. It published an apology by a woman who, when she was a student at an elite high school for girls, had participated in the denunciation and murder of the school’s vice principal. She was the daughter of a famous general, and one of her classmates was a daughter of Deng Xiaoping. The article sparked an outpouring of anger and outrage that was so intense that the government banned the topic from government media.

Mr. Wu told Mr. Johnson that by publishing the woman’s apology he hoped to spur a national discussion on responsibility for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution similar to Germany’s self-scrutiny after World War II. In China, however, a careful examination of the party’s actions during that brutal period is the last thing the government wants. As Mr. Johnson notes, this is not an irrelevant topic “given that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other leaders came of age in that era and some may have participated in the violence.” One of the reasons Remembrance still publishes while other journals have been shut down is that it has shifted some editing functions overseas, where it is safe from censorship and some readers in China can access it.

The inspiration for the book’s title comes from a short-lived student-run journal from 1960 called Spark. The story of the magazine and the idealistic young people who ran it forms the book’s most compelling chapter. The students, who had been sent to the countryside during the Great Famine, naively believed that if they publicized the cannibalism and other horrors they observed there, the party would change its destructive land-reform policies. Spark published only two issues before the government shut it down and arrested and jailed the students. In the 2000s, documentary filmmaker Hu Jie rescued Spark from oblivion in a powerful online movie that has now disappeared from China’s websites. In Mr. Johnson’s words, the students’ story “showed that the search for a freer, more humane China wasn’t new. It was something that Chinese people had been struggling for since the party took power.” Mr. Hu’s film, “In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul,” is available on YouTube with English subtitles.

Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has made control of party history one of his signature polices. Under Mr. Xi’s rule, “Communist Party myths dominate Chinese textbooks, museums, films and tourist spots,” Mr. Johnson writes. Mr. Xi has shut down unauthorized publications and museums and imprisoned those who challenge the party’s version of the truth. Today there are 36,000 sites around the country that commemorate the Communist revolution, and “red tourism” by domestic visitors is a government priority. The objective is, of course, indoctrination. Citizens are told to report cases of historical inaccuracy to the Illegal and Harmful Information Reporting Center.

Needless to say, the independent thinkers profiled in “Sparks” pursue their work at the risk of punishment by a government that wants to isolate and silence them. Dissenters can lose their jobs, be forced into exile or jailed. Scholars can be denied university jobs, transferred to minor universities in remote provinces, or forbidden to teach the history of China’s recent past.

Toward the book’s end, Mr. Johnson refers to the coming “battle” as the state ramps up its campaign to clamp down on independent voices. He takes encouragement from the Covid protests of the 2020s as well as from recent uprisings in Hong Kong, Tibet and other ethnic-minority regions. “The fact is that independent thought lives in China,” he writes. “It has not been crushed.”

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.