A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMIST NEW YORKER AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023'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 powerful reminder of the ways in which China's future
depends on who controls the past' Peter HesslerA documentary filmmaker who spent years
uncovering a Mao-era death camp an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who
suffered through Covid a magazine publisher who dodges 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. Marxism gave this
a modern gloss describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph.
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.
