China’s Counter-Histories

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

The CCP presses them terribly and largely succeeds. The journalists, professors, rights lawyers, and primitively equipped filmmakers who make up Johnson’s “underground historians” (alternatively, “counter-historians”) appear to be only a tiny minority. But he shows how they draw on values that have not only survived dynasties but also helped to bring some dynasties down. Today’s rulers seem aware of that. Our best evidence of this is the highly expensive 24/7 “stability maintenance” measures that the regime uses to monitor, dissuade, and, if necessary, stifle them. The tools of dissuasion are basically two: threats designed to induce fear and offers of comfort to reward capitulation. Beyond that, punishment.

The ancient Confucian value of yì 義 means to do what is right even (or especially) if it involves opposition to authority. Chinese history offers many glowing accounts of officials who, in addressing emperors, chose yì even at the cost of separation of head from torso. Johnson rightly points to another value—one that a high official would see as beneath his dignity but that was cherished and potent among ordinary people. This is the spirit of jianghu, literally “rivers and lakes,” which refers to the wilds from which xiake (“roving knights” or “righteous heroes”) emerge to help common people get justice. Today’s underground historians see themselves as heirs of the spirits of both yì and jianghu. As Johnson paraphrases them, “If the ancients dared to speak out, then how can I not?” Moreover they see themselves as passing their priceless tradition on to the future; their works are almost like time capsules: “They want future Chinese to know that in the 2020s, when things had never been darker, Chinese people inside China did not yield to comfort or fear.”

Their confidence in the durability of Chinese moral rectitude leads them not just to hope but actually to predict that eventually the cruel reign of the CCP will be no more:

They know they will win, not individually and not immediately, but someday. In essence, the Chinese Communist Party’s enemies are not these individuals but the lasting values of Chinese civilization: righteousness, loyalty, freedom of thought.

The counter-historians have no organization: no charter, officers, or meetings. They offer one another moral support in loose affiliation, but that’s all. The caution about organizing is necessary because the regime crushes—in embryo, if possible—any group it views as potentially oppositional. The Internet has helped immensely in making informal liaison possible. Before the Internet, people had to meet at physical places, police could raid them, and meetings were broken up. Online meetings with people physically dispersed are more difficult to disrupt. (The regime still tries, but its task is harder.)

Johnson gives many examples of the people and episodes in Communist China’s past that have been documented by the underground historians. Mao Zedong’s land reform movement of the early 1950s was not a transfer of land from landlords to farmers but a land confiscation by the CCP. “Landlords” (including many who hardly deserved that label but were identified as such to fill quotas set by the regime) were targeted for “class struggle.” Millions were executed.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 caused the suffering of millions of intellectuals who had dared to voice criticisms of the new society. It led to broken families, suicides, and banishment to labor camps in remote areas. No example has been more chilling than the recently uncovered story of Jiabiangou, a labor camp in the Gobi Desert of China’s northwest, which was so isolated that there was no need to put fences around it. Anyone who walked out would die of dehydration. Inside the camp thousands starved, especially during the Great Famine of 1958–1962. Some were driven to the ghastly dilemma of whether or not to consume the flesh of fellow inmates who had died.

In 1959 a group of students who had been sent to the countryside as “rightists” became sufficiently horrified by the famine and by the official mendacity about it that they came up with a quixotic plan to bring down the Communist Party by founding a journal, which they named Spark. Within a year all its organizers were tracked down and either imprisoned or executed. One of Spark’s main contributors, Lin Zhao, later became famous for her defiance in prison and was the subject of a splendid film by Hu Jie called Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004).¹ Deprived of ink, Lin had written letters from prison in blood. When she finally was executed, the regime sent an agent to demand that her mother reimburse the state for the cost of the bullet. Spark’s legacy lasted into the twenty-first century, and now it provides the title for Johnson’s book.

In January 1967, during the frenzied years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Yu Luoke and his younger brother Yu Luowen published the Journal of Secondary School Cultural Revolution. It opposed the persecution of people Mao had dubbed “the five black categories”: landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists. The journal’s circulation soon reached the tens of thousands, its editorial board swelled to twenty, and every day the editors received hundreds of letters from readers. It was forcibly closed in April 1967. Yu Luoke was arrested, imprisoned, and, in March 1970, shot by firing squad in Beijing’s largest stadium, where schoolchildren were assembled to view the execution in order that they might draw their own conclusions about the wisdom of resistance.

In the 1980s Tan Hecheng, whom Johnson describes as “garrulous, stubborn, and emotional,” stumbled upon the story of the mass political murder of nine thousand or more people in a remote area of Hunan province. Tan spent the next four decades on a one-person crusade to document how, during “class struggle” in August 1967, they were bludgeoned to death, and their bodies were tossed into rivers—or, more imaginatively (in order to underscore the political zeal of the attackers), dispatched by methods with colorful names like “homemade airplanes,” which described the way their body parts flew in all directions when explosives roped to them were detonated. In 2011 Tan published (in Hong Kong) a book called Blood Myths, which was later translated and condensed as The Killing Wind (2017).

In the late 1970s Gao Hua, a university student from a family that had suffered bitterly under Mao, began a project to examine how the entire Mao disaster had begun. He found that the horrors of the 1950s and 1960s had their seeds in the years between 1930 and 1945, when Mao elbowed his way to the top of the CCP and established a regime that could and did destroy anyone who would challenge him. Gao worked almost entirely alone for twenty-two years before publishing, in Hong Kong, a nine-hundred-page book called How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. The “Red Sun” of the title is Mao. Johnson writes that the book is “dense, long, and challenging” yet an “overwhelming” achievement, “a rewriting of the Yan’an myth that also calls into question the entire Communist project.”

Wu Wenguang, a documentary filmmaker who specializes in recording the lives of ordinary people, uses an approach that differs in one significant respect from that of his “underground” peers. Wu shares their values but stays just barely “inside the system” politically. He avoids conspicuous trespass into the regime’s forbidden zones, and the reward for this circumspection is that he can do more work with less hassle and can show at least some of it inside China. In 2010 he launched the Folk Memory Project, in which dozens of young people have gone to their hometowns carrying rudimentary equipment to film survivors of the Great Famine. By 2020 they had interviewed more than 1,300 people in 246 villages.

An underground journal called Remembrance began publishing in 2008 from a high-rise apartment in a Beijing suburb. The editors invite people to send in accounts of events that they remember or have researched. The journal uses footnotes and has something of an academic flavor. Its issues, which are seventy to ninety pages in length, are sent out every two weeks in PDF form to a list of subscribers whose total number is kept below two hundred, because a circulation any higher would make the journal a “publication” that would need government registration; below two hundred, it can be just a “newsletter.” The editors encourage a just-the-facts objectivity, but the facts tell stories. During the violence of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, for example, 22,900 people died and another 790,000 were imprisoned, yet at the time no attention was paid to the fact that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly Han Chinese and the victims overwhelmingly Mongolians.

The counter-historians have been marginalized, muzzled, sometimes imprisoned, and occasionally executed, but, Johnson notes, they don’t go away. Moreover they understand themselves as a chain—from the “1957 rightists” to Spark (1959) to Yu Luoke (1967) to the “Democracy Wall” (1979) to the Tiananmen protests (1989) to the “rights support” movement (2002–2008) to citizen journalism during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2021) and the “white paper” protests (2022). Each rising is smashed, but no smashing breaks the chain. Johnson sees the pattern as continuing, with “new sparks that leap off the flint of history every time it is struck.”²

This tenacity seems to contradict an opposite trend that others have noticed. In 1990, while in refuge at the US embassy in Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi published an essay in these pages called “The Chinese Amnesia.”³ He argued that the CCP’s skill at suppressing memory, well practiced after both 1957 and 1979, would be applied again to the 1989 events and that later Chinese generations might not know about them. In 2014 Louisa Lim published The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, in which she essentially spells out how Fang’s prediction was proved right. Today many of my students in California who come from China don’t know that there was a massacre in 1989. But there is no contradiction: Fang, Lim, and Johnson are all correct. The steely determination of the counter-historians is all the more impressive when one appreciates the strength of the headwinds they have faced.

Two of them whom Johnson describes in more detail than others are the filmmaker Ai Xiaoming and the journalist Jiang Xue, both of whom are women. Many others are women as well, including the Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser, the public intellectual Cui Weiping, the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, and the sexuality expert Li Yinhe. It was apparent during the white-paper protests in Shanghai in November 2022 that the leaders were women and that many (perhaps most?) of the supporters in the streets were, too. In recent years the most energetic and effective leaders of young Chinese freethinkers overseas have been women as well. By contrast, in spring 1989, when I was in Beijing during the huge pro-democracy demonstrations, men in the streets outnumbered women. Something, it seems, has changed.

We might ask to what extent feminism has become a motivation in China’s political opposition. In recent years, especially among university students, Me Too has dawned; it has also suffered attack, in the form of retaliation and defamation lawsuits, even as the potential for its growth, given China’s still highly patriarchal society, remains enormous. For young feminists, the pursuit of gender equality has sometimes had a secondary effect of leading to antiauthoritarianism more generally. It seems that resistance to patriarchy, as one form of authoritarianism, can lead naturally to resistance to political oppression, since political bosses are, in fact, usually male.

Whether people of both sexes in China’s liberal movement see the connection equally well is not clear, however. Li Sipan, one of China’s most articulate feminists, has written an article asking why it is that men in China’s political opposition, however astute in their antiauthoritarianism, have trouble bringing gender equality into daily practice. She finds that even among colleagues in the opposition, the men tend to see the women as the second sex.

Johnson has a chapter on “History as Myth,” and his point is profound. The CCP claims that its role in history has been “correct” and is, in consequence, the foundation of its right to rule. The emperors of old did this as well. An emperor was the “son of heaven.” (“Heaven” did not mean an extraterrestrial place but, roughly, “the natural order of things.”) The emperor’s rule was legitimate because he had a “mandate” from heaven. When a new dynasty took over, it was the duty of court historians to write recent history so that the moral judgment of heaven was plain. The CCP inherited this traditional notion and fused it with the Leninist idea of a “party” conceived abstractly enough that it could be held to be infallible. Actual party members might make mistakes. Even Mao, in the estimation of his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was “70 percent correct, 30 percent incorrect.” But the party itself was by definition immaculate.

This is why, when underground historians expose facts that tarnish or wholly invert the Communist Party’s account of itself, it sees them as not just inaccurate but blasphemous. The threat is existential. Can it be that the land reform of the early 1950s was not the transfer of land to its tillers? Was it in fact a seizure of power achieved through the methodical execution of people tagged as “landlords”? If that is true, then (in Johnson’s words) “by what right did the party rule?” The counter-historians might be very few, but they are termites in the foundation of CCP rule. The regime fears that their accounts of the past—even if “just the facts”—might spread. And then what?

The most detailed counter-history of the Great Famine is Yang Jisheng’s book Mubei (Tombstone).⁴ The title provides a sly ambiguity: Is the book a literary tombstone for the tens of millions of victims or a moral tombstone for the regime that caused their deaths? The CCP has always feared tombstones, be they literary or physical. When the famous dissident Liu Binyan died in 2005, authorities forbade his family to engrave the words “Here lies a Chinese person who did some things that it was right for him to do and said some things that were right that a person say” on his tombstone. What if those words inspired onlookers? What if a group formed? When Liu Xiaobo, another eloquent CCP critic and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, died in 2017, the regime took extraordinary steps to ensure that his ashes were buried at sea. There they are eternally dispersed. No tombstone, no threat.

The regime’s attempts at erasure have given rise to a shrewd answer from its critics: blankness can be eloquent. When the authorities vetoed the epitaph for Liu Binyan’s tombstone, his family countered by leaving it, for the time being, blank. Saying nothing in a sense said it all. In the 2010s what Johnson calls “China’s liveliest public forum” for lectures and readings was one in Xi’an that called itself Zhiwuzhi—“I Know I Know Nothing.” When white-paper demonstrators in November 2022 held up blank pages to protest Covid restrictions (plus, implicitly, much more), the blankness was useful at several levels. First, it was useful in countering police interrogation: “I wrote nothing—what can you charge me with?” More deeply, it invited reader participation: “Fill in what you like, and you will be part of our protest.” To the regime it said, “You know that I know that you know that we both know what I mean.” Today one of the most popular podcasts among young Chinese from the PRC who are living abroad is called Bumingbai boke—the “Unclear Blog” or “I-Don’t-Get-It Blog.”

The regime is aware that seeds of its potential undoing lie not only in history but in daily life. The populace today is blanketed in disinformation and politically intimidated, so very little resistance appears on the surface, but beneath the surface the everyday values of Chinese life survive, and these are very different from either Marxism or Xi Jinping Thought. Activists in the rights-support movement of 2002–2008 perceived this and made good use of it. As pro-democracy reformers, they were quite similar to (and in some cases the same people as) the activists of the 1980s. But in the 1980s the main hope was that change could be brought about by working through “liberal-minded” leaders. As late as the 1989 demonstrations, a major demand was still for “dialogue” with the top.

After the June 4 massacre, the strategy had to change. There was no longer any hope of working with the top, where, in any case, no one remained to be interlocutor. The “liberal” leaders had died, had been placed under house arrest, or felt paralyzed in the harsh new atmosphere. Democracy activists now looked downward, into society, and were pleasantly surprised to learn that the commonsense values of ordinary people were not only thriving but in fundamental agreement with their own democratic notions.

From 2006 to 2008, Liu Xiaobo wrote several essays in which he showed how the advent of the Internet in China allowed people to discover that they agreed with one another about notions of justice—which included what the rest of the world called “human rights.” In the days before the Internet, if the sons of local officials raped a young woman, killed her, and threw her body into a river, their fathers could lie about it and few people would know the truth. Public opinion then was atomized. But with the Internet, accounts of official misbehavior could spread quickly and lead to public protests. Wrongdoers could be held accountable—not because protests themselves could do that but because of pressure from superiors. If “the masses” in a certain county created a furor, provincial authorities could accuse officials in that county of not governing well. From this pattern Liu learned that ordinary people did not need any instruction from him in the theory of human rights. The Internet was crucial, but not because it enabled people to reach overseas, to Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, to learn about rights. It simply let fellow citizens know what had happened, which led to a natural convergence of moral opinion.

This digging downward to uncover commonsense values can apply not just to society but to individuals. Many Chinese writers in the Communist years have provided illustrations. Zhang Xianliang, who wrote extensively about his experiences in labor camps, was at first frightened by the abrasive jargon used by both inmates and guards. In time, though, he learned that many people had “a true self within” that was something different. The exterior of a person was the more visible part, but it might be like a callus, grown for protection from a harsh environment. Inside, a more natural self could survive.

During the Communist years, the biggest mistake that outsiders have made in trying to understand what China “thinks” has been to accept superficial impressions as the entire story. The regime’s political labels (“Communist,” “bourgeois,” “counterrevolutionary,” and many others) are worthless in any serious social analysis. People’s private minds have more than one level, and surfaces can be misleading. The broad distinction between “what I think” and “what I show” applies in a wide variety of ways. As just one example, take the term xiao fenhong (“little pinks”). It refers to strident voices of young people who “love China” and “hate America” or “hate Japan.” Little pinks do, indeed, assail the US and Japan inveterately. But is it “hate” in the sense of “we reject everything about you”? Hardly. One of their most common complaints is that the US is dominating the world and “keeping China down.” But the complaint entails that “we wish we were where you are” and that “where you are is not all bad.” The voices express not hate so much as rivalry. Yet people, including both supporters and critics of the CCP, tend to accept that little pinks hate America.

Ian Johnson’s counter-historians would not make this mistake. Their mission, simple yet heroic, is to stay grounded in how things actually are.