Some worry: will the Chinese Communist Party completely destroy Chinese civilization, wrecking it beyond any hope of recovery? The great despots of ancient times—Qin Shi Huang, Emperor Yang of Sui, Genghis Khan, Zhu Yuanzhang, and others—however brutal they were, never managed to sever the continuity of Chinese civilization. But today's Communist Party, equipped with modern electronic technology capable of watching every single person in China around the clock and controlling every facet of society (something ancient tyrants could only have dreamed of), might it be the one to finally break China's long civilizational continuity?
One Canadian journalist, who often publishes in the New York Times, is not so pessimistic. He believes that China's humanistic values possess a resilient capacity for survival. In his new book, Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson describes unofficial activists under CCP rule—journalists, professors, students, filmmakers, and others—who, at great personal risk, have persisted in documenting the truth of history.
These tough-minded individuals do not necessarily know one another, nor do they necessarily belong to the same generation. Some witnessed history with their own eyes; others documented it based on later research. But their values align, revealing a tradition of resistance passed down wave after wave: the terrifying truth of the land reform of the early 1950s, the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the tens of millions who starved to death from 1959 to 1962, the bloody climax of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, the Democracy Wall of 1979, the pro-democracy movement and massacre of the spring of 1989, the rights-defense movement of the 2000s, the mass abuse of Uyghurs in 2017, and the White Paper protest movement of 2022. The book records countless almost unimaginable details of cruelty.
Those who have dared to stand up and speak the truth are often seen as vanishingly rare: Lin Zhao, Yu Luoke, Liu Binyan, Liu Xiaobo, and others. They had no formal organization, wrote no charters or agreements, and had no “leaders.” All of this was deliberate—and also unavoidable. Living in an environment where “the bird that sticks its head out gets shot,” they could only maintain informal contact with one another. The rise of the internet has helped enormously. Before the internet, holding a meeting required a physical venue; once the police learned the location, they could raid it and force a dispersal. After the internet, people could act in a scattered, decentralized way—police could eavesdrop, but it became much harder to break the network apart.
Why Do Protesters Keep Coming, Wave After Wave?
Why do new generations of protesters keep emerging, one after another? Isn't it painful to watch each generation get crushed in turn? Where does this resilient, unsinkable spirit come from? There are several reasons. First, these bold individuals are merely the tip of the iceberg, in reality representing far larger numbers of compatriots who are not quite so bold. Second, what truly persists is not the protesters themselves but the inhuman practices of the tyranny they resist. Wherever there is abuse, resistance will naturally follow—protesters should be thought of as soldiers taking turns on the front line, one shift relieving the next. Third, the moral foundation of protest is not some momentary flash of inspiration but the long-standing values embedded in Chinese history itself. Ian Johnson points out that national treasures of literature such as Qu Yuan's “Li Sao” and Su Dongpo's “Ode to the Red Cliffs” all celebrate the eternal value of yi (righteousness/duty). Today's unofficial historians likewise draw their nourishment from this same wellspring of “righteousness.”
They remain loyal not only to the long span of history behind them, but also form a kind of tacit understanding with compatriots yet to come. Johnson writes: “They hope that future Chinese will know that in the 2020s, when everything had grown darker than ever before, the Chinese people at home did not submit.” It is, in effect, a letter sealed inside a time capsule.
The CCP fights hard against these dissident historians and does everything it can to suppress and punish them. In reality, this is because it fears them. It might seem strange—a country with a $17 trillion GDP and a two-million-strong army, why on earth should it fear a handful of independent historians? It seems to make no sense, but in fact there is a very important reason behind it.
The CCP's Problem of “Legitimacy”
The CCP's “legitimacy” requires it to claim that its own historical record has been 100% “correct.” This concept has two quite different origins, which have fused into one within the CCP itself.
The first origin lies in the tradition of ancient emperors. The notion that an emperor holds the “Mandate of Heaven” means that Heaven has chosen this person to govern the world of men. The founding emperor of a new dynasty was originally an outsider—someone who rebelled or invaded—but once the dynasty was established, the granting of the “Mandate of Heaven” retroactively affirmed his arrival: his rule became natural, and therefore proper. As a result, whoever wrote the history of the new dynasty was obligated to emphasize its glory. The Mao dynasty was no exception. The CCP's history, too, must be 100% correct.
The second origin is the Leninist tradition the CCP borrowed from the Soviet Communist Party. Lenin's concept of “the Party” is an abstraction: the Party is perfect and can tolerate no flaws whatsoever. Individual Party members may make mistakes—even Mao Zedong, in Deng Xiaoping's own assessment, was “seventy percent right, thirty percent wrong.” But the Party itself? It cannot be anything less than 100% correct. This is a matter of definition.
This is why, when the CCP looks at the work of unofficial historians, what it fears is not merely the question of “inaccuracy,” but the far graver question: “could this undermine our legitimacy?” If the land reform movement of the early 1950s was not actually meant to transfer land to those who tilled it—if, in reality, a planned five percent of the population was branded “landlords” and then shot, all in order to consolidate the new regime's power—if the real objective of transferring all land ownership to the CCP was to shore up the economic foundation of the new dynasty—then how could the Party's “legitimacy” possibly be explained? And if such information ever came fully to light, what consequences might follow?
The Czech dissident Václav Havel noticed that a handful of people writing the truth of history could have an outsized effect. In his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,” he cites the following analysis regarding the Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Why was Solzhenitsyn expelled from his homeland? Certainly not because he represented any real threat to power, not because anyone in the regime feared he might replace them… No—it was a panicked reaction on the part of the Soviet Communist Party. At all costs, it had to plug this terrifying wellspring of truth, because the truth flowing from it might trigger an immeasurable shift in social consciousness, which could in turn lead, in the future, to unpredictable and even catastrophic political consequences. And so the Soviet Union operated in its own peculiar way: so long as it kept the whole of society sealed shut, tightly locked down, it could present itself as being made of solid stone. But the moment someone shouted, “The emperor has no clothes!”—the moment a single person broke the rules of the game (thereby exposing it as a game)—everything suddenly appeared in an entirely different light, and the whole shell now seemed to be made of nothing more than a crumbling sheet of wastepaper.
A handful of true words spoken by a few people can shatter this “shell made of wastepaper” precisely because the values contained within that shell were, in fact, nothing but abstract political ideology broadcast from the top down by the government—representing the interests of the regime, not the concrete, everyday interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like the “Three-Anti and Five-Anti,” “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” “Greater, Faster, Better, More Economical,” “Bombard the Headquarters,” “Destroy the Four Olds,” “Immediate Results,” “Smashing the Gang of Four,” “Look Forward,” the “Four Modernizations,” the “Four Cardinal Principles,” “the Dalai Lama is a separatist,” “Falun Gong is an evil cult,” “Hong Kong harbors dreams of independence,” “Taiwan harbors dreams of independence,” “Big Daddy Xi is the core”—all of these float above people's everyday lives, disconnected from them. What ordinary people actually care about is what people everywhere, in every era, have always cared about: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, healthcare, education, whether relationships between people are fair, and so on. The age-old value of “righteousness” has always depended on these very things—it has little to do with the outer shell of the regime.