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FCCC Online Talk: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
October 25, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm UTC+8
FreeThe past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism’s triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Join us for a talk with Ian Johnson on his new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, where he describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.
About our speaker:
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, researcher, and senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Johnson has lived in China for more than 20 years and has been following the country since first going there as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985. He worked as a newspaper correspondent in China from 1994 to 1996 with Baltimore’s The Sun, and from 1997 to 2001 with The Wall Street Journal. In 2009, Johnson returned to China, living there until 2020 when he was expelled as part of worsening tensions between China and the United States.