A movement challenges China's rulers on the meaning of the country's past.
 | By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
There's a line in Ian Johnson's new essay on China's underground historians that struck me with particular force the first time I read it. Some of the people he writes about — those working to make a record of China's true history, not the sanitized version presented by the Communist Party — "simply treat their work as time capsules. They know their work will probably not be freely available in China in the near future," he writes. But they pursue it regardless, out of a sense that the act of documentation is important for its own sake. |
I found this idea incredibly moving. What does it take to dedicate your life to a project, knowing that the people you're making it for may never see it within your lifetime? Is doing so heroic? Naïve? Both? |
Johnson's essay, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, is about a movement of academics, journalists, filmmakers and others united in their desire to tell the whole story of Communist Party rule — everything from the man-made famines of the last century to the Covid response of the past few years. This movement, he writes, is challenging an authoritarian government on territory it considers sacrosanct — the Communist Party sees history as the key to its legitimacy — and yet it has been surprisingly resilient. Its members endure harassment and surveillance, but they also still make work, and distribute that work surprisingly widely, thanks to simple technologies like PDFs and handheld cameras. |
The essay, which will also be the cover of the Sunday Opinion section this weekend, runs counter to what has come to be the conventional wisdom in the liberal democratic world about China these days: that it is a country beyond salvation, where everyone is either smothered by the constant surveillance or has succumbed to mindless nationalism. |
These problems are very real, writes Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent two decades in China. But, as he puts it, "the fact that people still resist and do so in a more coordinated form than at any time in the history of the People's Republic seems more significant than the banal point that an authoritarian regime is authoritarian. The fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed." And their work may become relevant sooner than we appreciate, thanks to the social and economic issues that have beset China in recent years, and which have sent some citizens looking for alternative ways of seeing the world than those supplied to them by the state. |
But ultimately, he writes, we shouldn't judge the impact of these people on the basis of whether or not their work helps secure change in China; their importance is more fundamental than that. The essay includes a quote from the philosopher Hannah Arendt: |
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth … Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun. |
"Arendt's quote is especially apt because it is open-ended," Johnson writes. "It doesn't imply that people working for change in dark times are bound to win because good always trumps evil, or some other dubious cliché. But the implication is clear: in dark times, light is precious; it always matters." |
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