POLITICS
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future
Ian Johnson
Allen Lane, $55

In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. My final stop was a visit to Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. A long stream of mourners filed through to view the Great Helmsman, wrapped in the hammer and sickle.

Many lay yellow roses, which, lest the pile tip and threaten the scene’s solemnity, were hastily gathered by white-gloved guards and presumably resold out front. Some were visibly or perhaps performatively affected, weeping before emerging blinking into the smog of Tiananmen Square. While the waxen Mao was clearly dead, he continues to define the bounds of Chinese society and politics, haunting on a national scale.

In Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson refutes the Western assumption that the grieving I observed represents a one-China history: monolithic, top down with absolute obeisance to the official version. Johnson has assembled a compelling collection of writers, poets and documentary filmmakers that represent an underground historical movement; empowered by technology, they represent a genuine challenge to the party that itself taps into a long tradition.

The title Sparks is particularly evocative. Named after Sparks, an underground 1960 journal written by students politically exiled to a rural backwater. They believed they could provoke change by revealing the corruption, hypocrisy and immense humanitarian cost of Mao’s policies.

In authentic samizdat style, the first edition was printed on a mimeograph machine in a sulphuric acid plant. Two members of the clique pretended to be cultivating bacteria for the plant, sealed themselves in a room away from any nosy informants to hand carve the rolls for printing. The result was eight pages of incendiary essays attacking Communist leadership for gorging themselves while the country starved, comparing Mao’s cult of personality to Nazi worship.

The clique was eventually exposed, members imprisoned, the leaders executed. Sparks may have vanished without a trace, but copies were kept by the state, that were scanned and shared among intellectuals. Despite an initial run of only 30, the publication remains a beacon for historians and journalists.

China is ruled by what Johnson calls “documentary politics” in which history is rigidly hierarchical, communicated through resolutions. These rare documents have extraordinary implications, issued only thrice in the past: by Mao, Deng Xiaoping and finally by Xi, they define history in epic hagiographic strokes, framing the party’s new direction and their predecessor’s legacy.