The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it has always been crucial to political power, from past dynasties who rewrote history to justify their rule to today’s Chinese Communist Party who builds on this to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. One of Xi Jinping’s signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party’s survival.

Ian Johnson has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history. 

In recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Johnson reveals how they have bypassed China’s legendary surveillance state with digital technologies – clandestine journals, guerilla media posts, underground films – showing 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.

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Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher. He is best known for his reporting from grassroots China, with projects usually taking years of on-the-ground research to complete. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a  Public Scholar grant, a solo Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China, Stanford University’s Shorenstein prize for his body of work on Asia, a grant from the Open Society Foundation, a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news writing and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation grant for work-in-progress.

GOOD READS

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (2023); The Souls of China (2017); Chinese Characters, Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (2012); Wild Grass, Three Portraits of Change in Modern China (2004); The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (2016).

KEY LINKS

Ian Johnson's website

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