Sparks

China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

De: Ian Johnson

Narrado por: Ian Johnson

Duración: 12 h y 12 m

Resumen del Editor

Brought to you by Penguin.

In China today a nationwide movement emerges, defying crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.

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 justify its rule.

But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists and film-makers have challenged this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present.

Based on years of research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead 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-twenty-first century.

©2023 Ian Johnson (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

'An indelible feat of reporting...Sparks is alive with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably, refuse to let their histories be forgotten.' (Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers)

'A revelation: this historian from overseas spent years penetrating the world of underground Chinese historians, becoming in his own right a recorder of pioneers such as Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Jiang Xue, who use text and video to record China's lost history.' (Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker, God is Red and For a Song and a Hundred Songs)

'This compelling and highly enjoyable book will greatly enhance the general reader's understanding of the subtle counter-currents of resistance at work in Chinese society below the smooth surface of control and compliance.' (Sebastian Veg, author of Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals)