A FINANCIAL TIMES AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 'Johnson's stories bring ... this
history chillingly alive' Christina Patterson Sunday Times 'An indelible feat of reporting
and an urgent read ... It's a privilege to read books like these' Te-Ping Chen author of Land
of Big Numbers A documentary filmmaker who uncovered a Mao-era death camp an independent
journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid a magazine publisher who
dodged the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China's Underground
Historians and their Battle for the Future a vital account of how some of China's most
important writers filmmakers and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge
the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground - its monopoly on history. In
traditional China dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their
predecessors were unworthy of holding power. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas
to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule. But in recent years critical thinkers from
across the land have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital
technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state their samizdat journals guerilla
media posts and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and
purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. Based on years of research in
Xi Jinping's China Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all
free thought revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of
memory against forgetting - a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st
century.
