'Sparks' author Ian Johnson on Chinese 'challenging the party's monopoly on history'
One of the first things Xi Jinping did after being named general secretary of China's ruling Communist Party was tour an exhibition at the National Museum on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square.
It was called "the Road to Rejuvenation." News photos showed Xi and other top leaders standing reverently before photos and artifacts that traced the long arc of China's modern history. The symbolism was hard to miss.
In his new book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson says Xi unveiled the concept of the "China Dream" at the museum on that fall day in 2012. "That goal was closer at hand than at any time in recent history, Xi said, because the nation had learned from its history," Johnson writes.
In the following years, Xi would put on display a dogged obsession with controlling the historical narrative — shuttering independent journals, muzzling outspoken scholars, jailing critics he accused of "historical nihilism," and re-drawing the boundaries around school curricula.
Yet through it all, a handful of people chronicling China's "grassroots history" has been fighting back. Johnson calls it a movement, and his book tells their stories. They are people like the filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, who made a documentary about an all but forgotten forced labor camp
