How Chinas Underground Historians Fight The Politics Of Amnesia
Spark wasn't a big magazine. Secretly typed and copied on an old typewriter in a sulfuric acid factory in a remote region of central China, publication began in 1960 and never reached more than two printings. The first consisted of little more than poems and a few articles criticizing Mao Zedong's current Great Leap Forward campaign. At the end of 1960, young men and women from the organization were arrested and some of their helpers were executed as “counter-revolutionaries” after years of imprisonment in terrible conditions. Spark was read by very few people.
However, as Ian Johnson makes clear in his excellent and elegant book Sparks: Chinese Aircraft Historians and the Future of War (Oxford), the publication had posthumous value. The title is based on a common Chinese proverb: “A single spark can ignite a field of fire.” With a strong but never dogmatic moral conviction, Johnson pays tribute to writers, intellectuals, poets and filmmakers who had the courage to challenge the Communist Party's propaganda deliver. These dissidents – who call themselves “historians on the ground” – look beyond official lies to the past and present to document the truth about taboo subjects, Mao's campaigns to eradicate enemy groups, and, of course, anyone suffering from paranoia. They often paid long prison sentences, torture or death for their honesty. Their discoveries - presented in original videos, fake sites and underground magazines - did not reach a large audience when published, but were at least recorded for posterity.
For some historians, preserving the legacy of historians and witnesses of the past was a vital task. A recurring name in “Sparks” is Hu Ji, an Army veteran and visual artist who explores documentaries forgotten by various deadly policies. Lin Zhao, a poet who contributed to Spark , was the subject of Hu's 2004 film "In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul." Hu preserved his legacy by interviewing people who knew him. In the late 1960s, Lin was arrested and imprisoned for writing poems expressing his desire for freedom. In a single room (with rubber walls to prevent suicide), tied to a chair and not beaten by guards, he tapped his finger with the end of a toothbrush and wrote his poems on paper. . Blood like paint. Eventually, his head was wrapped in a faux fur hood that only had slits for his eyes and nose, and he couldn't breathe, let alone speak. Lynn was shot in 1968. His family had to pay for the vaccination.
He explained to Johnson why he took the risk of remembering people like him: "They weren't afraid of dying." They died in secret, we don't know what heroes the following generations were. I think it's a moral question. They died for us. If we don't know, it's a tragedy." Two years later, Hu completed the film "Even If He Goes," about an incident in the summer of 1966 in which a proud vice principal of a communist girls' school was tortured Students in Beijing. In 2013, Hu made a documentary about Spark and the long-forgotten magazine Ever After. It attracted more and more viewers, including YouTube.
There are other underground chroniclers, including Wang Bing, whose films have won many awards at international festivals. One of his films, “The Ditch” (2010), depicts the lives and deaths of political prisoners in a concentration camp in the 1960s, when extreme hunger forces people to eat the corpses of their comrades. He cut out the lungs and other internal organs and ate them like dead people who had little flesh.
Johnson also looks at lesser-known figures such as Ai Xiaoming, a Chinese literature professor specializing in women's studies, whose admiration for Milan Kundera and whose experiences with the 1989 Tiananmen protests raised doubts about the bureaucracy. Party line In the year Among the thousands of children affected by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
There are many current affairs in China that cannot be discussed safely, especially when key officials are involved. But Johnson's secret historians are primarily concerned with uncovering and preserving the forbidden memories of the past. The history of the official party imposed on the Chinese people is also official control. Many people born in China after 1989 have never heard of the Tiananmen massacre. Many young people who lived through the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and early 1970s had limited knowledge of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Mao's transformative industrial and agricultural policies took shape. Ten million starved to death. And many of those affected by the famine may not be fully aware of the land reform campaign in the early fifties, when many people were killed as an enemy class over land ownership (like Mao's father, but it's true. Party ideologues prefer to remain silent). ).
In 1990, Fang Lizhi, a dissident who entered the U.S. Embassy in Beijing only to be arrested after the Tiananmen attack in 1990, wrote an essay titled "China's Amnesia." “Every ten years or so, the true face of history is completely erased from the memory of Chinese society,” Johnson wrote in the lines he quoted. “Forgetting history is the goal of China’s communist policy. This can be expressed in any speech, book, document or other media.”
That's why Spark's story is so important to Hu Ji and others, including Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and died of cancer in prison while fighting for democratic reforms. The main character behind Spark was Zhang Chunyuan, a decorated Korean War veteran. In 1956, he accepted Mao's challenge during the Hundred Flowers Campaign to provide constructive criticism of the party. Like many other young thinkers, Zhang believed he could improve the country by exposing its shortcomings, in his case the quality of teaching and the lack of learning at the university. The regime quickly suppressed criticism. Zhang was sent to a poor and remote place to work at a tractor station.
It was the height of the Great Leap Forward, and Zhang saw other students sent to work in the countryside starving people. A student felt that Sun Xiu should report these depressing conditions to the communist authorities and wrote a letter to the organizers of the Red Flag , one of the party's main organizations. A few months later he was arrested, brutally beaten and forced to wear heavy containers full of feces and urine around his neck. Of course the party leadership is aware of what is happening. But if they wanted to keep their jobs or avoid prison, they had to produce inflated statistics to make Mao's fantasy a success. They stole what little food was left from farmers to improve their values. So Zhang and others decided to create a magazine: the accident had to be recorded.
Decades later, efforts to commemorate Txinparta and similar testimonies have gone beyond honoring the heroism of these historians to ensuring that the document of the past is not lost. Writing about the historian Gao Hua, Johnson was forced to study the early years of the Communist Party's history during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Before the liberation in 1949, when Mao terrorized the top leadership. A form of idolatry: Only Mao was a legitimate revolutionary leader, only his ideas were valid, only an ideological version of the past was valid.
Historians of Johnson's underground—books, films, and various publications—paled in comparison to the vast propaganda apparatus of the country's Communist Party. However, Johnson's value is unpredictable. To understand why he might be right, it is helpful to understand the role of history in Chinese politics.
The campaign to disseminate the official history, what is now called “national education,” is a pillar of the Chinese communist regime. After Mao established a "straight line" at Yan'an Cave, where communist leaders were at war with the Japanese in the 1940s, the goal was to make everything look as it did before the communist revolution . Corrupt, corrupt and crooked, this revolution was inevitable and only communist rule could restore China's power and glory. The party line has changed somewhat over the years. Deng Xiaoping, China's supreme leader from the late 1970s to the 1990s, was responsible for rebuilding the shattered economy, and Mao admits he made some mistakes. Today, President Xi Jinping has no patience for criticism of the Great Helmsman.
Johnson tells us that in the Yan'an region alone, where Mao's teachings were formulated, the government has designated four hundred and forty-five memorials and built thirty museums. There are 36,000 revolutionary sites, including 1,600 memorial halls and museums, all of which serve to educate countless schoolchildren and “red tourists.” Popular cinema and television entertainment features fictional stories about communist heroes fighting Japanese imperialists or defeating ruthless enemy units. And many memories from the southern Guangdong province, where the Opium War began, in the northeast, which was annexed by the Japanese in the 1930s, remind people of past humiliations that only the Communist Party can solve. .
Patriotic education does not only exist in the People's Republic of China. Americans need no reminding that history education can be a hotly contested political issue, even in a democracy. But the use of the past to legitimize political power has a long history in China. “For the Chinese, history is our religion,” Hu Ping, a pro-democracy exile living in New York, once wrote. “We don’t believe in a just God, but we believe in a just story.”
Each new dynasty of Imperial China had its own scribes who praised the new rulers and despised the old ones. Political legitimacy was a mixture of cosmology - the emperor as son of heaven, commissioned by heaven to rule the earth - and moral teachings based on Confucian philosophy. Obedience to authority is a Confucian virtue, but achieving this obedience is also a leader's duty.
Cartoon by Edward Stead
At least in theory, Confucian scholars were concerned with upholding the rule, often using history as their guide. If the rulers misbehaved, they would lose their authority from heaven. In some ways, Johnson's mystical historians are the latest among many courageous Confucian critics. As an example, Johnson cites Sima Qian, a leading Chinese historian who lived around 145 B.C.E. was born. In the Han Dynasty, Sima's career as a court historian changed when he insulted the king and cut off his testicles. His “Archive of Great History” was later completed as a private enterprise. Sima was an attempt to give not only a secular but also an accurate account of Chinese history, which had previously been an innovation but carried out by ordinary people. Like Johnson's historians - and the authorities who opposed him - Sima had a moral view of historiography. His job is not just to condemn mistakes. It was a reminder of charitable deeds for future generations.
While political consensus was strengthened during the imperial period, incorporating Confucian orthodoxy and official history, large areas of China were still outside the control of the central government. There was also what we call civil society: religious organizations – Buddhist, Taoist, then Christian – as well as clan associations and other independent social networks. Family loyalty and local support were more important than obedience to the central state. Many rebels against the Chinese authorities come from centuries-old religious groups and emerging sects among the oppressed. Governments based on moral orthodoxies can only be challenged by alternative orthodoxies, hence the brutal suppression of movements like Falun Gong by communist governments. It appears to be a relatively harmless cult of ancient Buddhist-inspired mediators. But for party ideologues, Falun Gong represents a direct and dangerous challenge to their ideological monopoly and therefore to the legitimacy of the communist regime.
