Archiving China’s Grassroots Historians | Ian Johnson 季風人文講壇第115期

[CC Subtitle Provided 本影片提供CC字幕] During the Cold War, public intellectuals in the Soviet bloc were household names in the West—Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Kundera, Forman. That isn’t the case for Chinese writers and filmmakers today. Why? In his 2023 book Sparks: China‘s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Johnson introduces us to some of these Chinese thinkers. That same year, he launched the China Underground Archives to make their works available in a systematic, non-partisan way for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. In this talk, Johnson describes the writing of Sparks, why he launched the archive, and how it has morphed into a widely read publication with its own weekly newsletter. Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and researcher based in Berlin. He is also the founder and director of the China Unofficial Archives, a repository for hundreds of books, samizdat magazines, and underground films banned in China. His latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, shows how–despite the best efforts of Xi Jinping’s surveillance state–a nationwide movement has coalesced to challenge the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.