In early 1990, one of China’s most famous dissidents sat holed up with his wife and son in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, watching their country convulse in violence. In June of the previous year, authorities had crushed student-led protests centered in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and sending many more into exile. Fang Lizhi had escaped to the embassy and was waiting for a deal that would allow him to leave.
In the depths of his despair, Fang wrote “Chinese Amnesia,” an essay that explains why tragedies continue to plague China. He claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was so absolutely into history that the vast majority of people were unaware of it. their endless cycles of violence. The result was that other people only knew what they had personally experienced, which made them vulnerable to the party’s indoctrination campaigns: “In this way, about once a decade, the true face of history is completely erased from the reminiscence of Chinese society,” Fang observed. “The purpose of Chinese communist policy is to ‘forget history. ‘”
For many others who analyze China today, the way Fang seeks to hunt China has become dominant. They argue that the party’s history is even harsher than ever because it is now subsidized by an even harsher technocratic state, led by a leader. Fully committed to whitewashing the afterlife. Meanwhile, a vast surveillance state monitors anyone who has a different view of the afterlife or the present. China’s amnesia is total.
And yet this view is wrong. Fang accurately described China as it was in the early 1990s. But starting a few years later, this pattern of historical erasure began to break down. The key reason is the rise of a movement of citizen historians who are successfully challenging the party’s control of history. Underpinning their efforts are two basic digital technologies that we often take for granted: PDFs and digital cameras. Because they are so ubiquitous in modern life, they are easily overlooked, and yet they have fundamentally changed how historical memory is preserved and spread in authoritarian states such as China. They allow people to revive banned or out-of-print books and create new publications without the need for printing presses or photocopy machines. They also free filmmakers from the bulky and expensive equipment that once only television or movie studios could afford. The result has been a two-decade flood of books, magazines, and films that were made on laptops and shared over long distances by email, file transfers, and memory sticks.
These teams have proven to be the fashionable weapons of the weak, allowing the emergence of an organization of others who confront the government for its ultimate vital source of legitimacy: its mythical narrative of history. In the party’s mythic narrative, the CCP came into its own in the mid-20th century to save China and continues to rule the country due to its largely unblemished record. By selling this narrative, the party has enormous advantages, adding a monopoly on television, film, publishing and the school curriculum. Still, that has not stopped citizen historians from proceeding to challenge the state, even today, under the government of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has made history one of his key policies.
Events such as last year’s “White Paper” protests against Covid lockdowns and the slowing economy show how giant teams of Chinese can see through the government’s self-centered narratives about the past. This complicated form of censorship means that most people agree with the government’s version of events. Now, however, enough people have access to select interpretations to provoke widespread and persistent questioning of the government. The party’s increasingly draconian efforts to tell the story of the strength of this insurgency, which Xi sees as a fight to the death that the party will have to win at all costs.
Since the Mao era, the CCP has used myths to chronicle the recent past. The worst crisis in the history of the People’s Republic was the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, which killed up to forty-five million people, about 20 times the number of deaths during the Cultural Revolution. Officially, however, it is estimated that the so-called “Three Hard Years” killed only a few million people and only because of herbal blunders and the withdrawal of Soviet advisers. In other words, the party is beyond reproach. And yet, this distorted view of history is rejected by almost every major historian, domestic or foreign, not to mention the other people who lived through it. They know that the famine was due to Mao’s delusional economic policies, which forced farmers to apply extravagant farming and trading methods that destroyed years of crops.
Until recently, however, this discrepancy wasn’t a significant problem for the party because it created only pockets of disconnect—some people might know the party’s version to be untrue, but most people would be aware only of the party’s account. But China’s unofficial historians have made the party’s version of events untenable on a host of key turning points over the nearly 75 years of CCP rule. These include massacres in the 1940s and 1950s against the gentry that had once run rural life (which the party calls the campaign against “landlords”), the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre, and, most recently, the COVID-19 lockdowns.
One of the cornerstones of this counterhistorical movement is a 1960s student magazine called Spark. It was founded by academics who had participated in a 1950s crusade against China’s intellectual elegance and were exiled to western China. There, they witnessed the effects of the Great Patriotic War. Famine: Cannibalism, mass starvation, and officials too terrified of Mao to report the truth. They founded the magazine in hopes of stirring up opposition to one-party rule, publishing articles opposing despotism, lack of freedom of expression, and powerlessness. of Chinese farmers.
Digital technologies have fundamentally replaced the old reminiscence, it is preserved and disseminated.
However, shortly after Spark’s launch, the government shut it down and confiscated all copies of the magazine. Forty-three other people were arrested; Three were executed and the rest were sent to hard labor camps. After Mao’s death in 1976 and the takeover by the moderates, the party partially repaired the excesses of that era. Other people were allowed to view their private records, or dang’an, a record that the state helps keep on each person and that contains everything from top school grades to police records. One of the academics involved in the magazine, Tan Chanxue, was able to read about its records in the 1980s and found that, in a clever bureaucratic way, the government had dutifully kept copies of everything that had been used to convict it. This included copies of the journal, the confessions of all the academics, and even the love letters she had written to her boyfriend. who had been one of the promoters of the magazine and who was executed in 1970.
Tan took pictures of the entire team, but he stayed in his apartment for years. Then came the 1990s, when his friends used shots to create PDFs. This recreated Spark in a virtual format and allowed others to revel in the scholars’ prophetic critique. It also allowed others to share a bunch of pages of police documentation about the academics, inspiring independent Chinese filmmakers, journalists, and public thinkers to make films, write books, and comment on the scholars and their magazine. Memories that were once collective memories not public, not for all Chinese but for a significant number of other people, many of whom had great knowledge and influence.
Over the past two decades, this rediscovery of the afterlife and the creation of a new ancient wisdom has been repeated many times. Hundreds of books now challenge the afterlife of the party and are widely available online, as videographers make ambitious documentaries and oral histories. to sustain voices that would once have been lost.
One way to understand China’s shifting relationship to historical memory is to examine one of the greatest Chinese writers of the past half century, the novelist Wang Xiaobo.
Wang was strongly influenced through his wife, Li Yinhe, known as one of China’s leading sexuality experts. She has researched and written about the gay and lesbian movement in China and, in recent years, has advocated for transgender and bisexual citizens. The two met in 1979 and married the following year. In 1984, the couple went to the University of Pittsburgh, where Li earned a doctorate. and Wang a master’s degree. Upon his return to China in 1988, Li eventually accepted a position at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Wang taught history and sociology at Renmin and Beijing universities.
During the 1989 student movement, Wang was silent about the protests. He had been scarred by the Cultural Revolution and was unsure of this amorphous movement. Who was running it? What were its objectives?Like many of his generation, he was wary of large, often chaotic movements. Remaining silent has become the subject of Wang’s most prominent essay, “The Silent Majority. “Wang described how the Mao era had silenced other people because of the omnipresence of the wonderful leader: his thoughts, ideas, and words rained down day and night. This left a scar that for Wang meant: “I could not accept as true those who belonged to the speaking societies. “become a private quest for Wang and an allegory of China as a whole.
This is what prompted Wang to examine homosexual communities in China. Disadvantaged groups have remained silent. They were voiceless. Society has even denied its existence. Wang then had an epiphany: much of Chinese society had no voice, not only other people with other sexual orientations, but also students, farmers, immigrants, miners, and others living in historic urban neighborhoods about to be demolished, etc. They were not just members of a few special interest teams, but represented a giant component of Chinese society. “These other people remain silent for a variety of reasons,” he wrote. Some because they don’t have the ability or ability to speak, others because they hide something, and others because they feel, for some reason, a certain dislike for the globality of speech. He added, “As one of them, I have a duty to speak of what I have noticed and heard. “
In fact, Wang had been caught off guard during the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and questioned his own inability to help the protesters. But he came to the conclusion that the protesters, however noble they may have been, represented an older way of doing things that he could no longer sustain. They saw themselves as classical intellectuals seeking to influence the state and were dissatisfied with having been ignored. Wang saw society differently. He considered his greatest challenge to be dividing it into teams that were too weak to oppose the overwhelming force of a one-party state. That is why China remains silent. Over time, he learned that he had to write about those teams and not become a more privileged intellectual.
Wang has become a prominent public intellectual who wrote prolifically for Chinese media. Although he died five years later, in 1997, from an attack at the center at the age of 44, he influenced an entire generation of people. One of them is an underground feminist academic. Filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, whose films explore disadvantaged groups in Chinese society, such as farmers, rape victims, and prisoners of hard-labor camps. Others, such as editors Yan Lianke and Liao Yiwu, also began to depict the most vulnerable members of society, as prisoners and victims of the Mao era. One of China’s most important filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, occasionally mentions Wang as the editor who encouraged him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state.
Wang himself was influenced by many thinkers. As a child, growing up in Mao’s China, he secretly read the works of Bertrand Russell and internalized his concept of personal freedom. In Pittsburgh, he also read Michel Foucault and his description of power relations. In addition to influencing Wang’s thinking, Foucault is also useful in explaining Wang’s role in Chinese society. Foucault describes how many intellectuals have moved from discussion of classical universal themes (freedom, morality, lifestyles) to spaces of expression. in which they possess specialized knowledge. With this experience, they can interfere well in public debates, on behalf of vulnerable groups, such as the poor, immigrants or others living with HIV/AIDS.
In the West, this began in the mid-20th century, but in China it was only imaginable with the virtual revolution. In the decade since Wang’s death, citizen historians have flourished, not only thanks to PDFs and reasonable virtual cameras, but also, for some years, a relatively flexible internet. This has allowed blogs, bulletin boards, and social media to flourish, offering a platform for many of those unofficial voices.
Wang Xiaobo and Li Yinhe, Beijing, 1996 Mark Leong
Xi Jinping’s rise to the force is part of a reaction against this era of openness. It cracked down on members of the rebel component, non-governmental organizations and public policy debates. But one of his main interests has been history. In 2016, he shut down the leading counterhistory magazine, China Through the Ages, even though his father, Xi Zhongxun, a senior civil servant, had strongly supported him. And in 2021, the Chinese government rewrote the rules for how history should be represented, further obscuring key events like the Cultural Revolution.
And yet, despite this growing effort to control the past, the work of citizen historians continues apace. While some of the most prominent filmmakers, such as filmmakers Ai and Hu Jie, have been harassed, others continue to work. the influential underground history magazine, Remembrance, has been frequently published in PDF format since 2008; It recently published its 245th issue.
It is no coincidence that among these “grassroots cults” it is less difficult to locate female voices, such as Ai, the poet Lin Zhao, and the publisher Jiang Xue, and minority voices, such as the imprisoned Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti and the Tibetan poet. Tsering Woeser. The World of Classical Public Thinkers. Citizen intellectuals and historians were not part of Confucian culture, with their condescending fear for the country or the people, but they were motivated to act for non-public reasons. “The one I most want to raise is ‘Myself,'” he wrote. “It’s despicable; it is also selfish; That’s true, too.
Wang shares this motivation with that of other popular thinkers. Journalist-turned-historian Yang Jisheng watched his adoptive father starve to death during the Great Famine and made the decision that the paintings of his life would be to document this terrible upheaval. Video blogger Tiger Temple painted as a child forced laborer on a railroad in the 1960s and later made the decision to document this story. Ai saw oppressed women. Jiang learned of his grandfather’s death from starvation and began researching the famine. More recently, many have suffered from the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and have begun documenting their experiences. This reaction can be considered narrow or parochial, however, as Wang Como acknowledges, it is also the way societies change: through other people seeking to perceive and describe their own lives.
Chinese citizens would possibly question official narratives about their country’s past.
The impact of these underground historians can be measured in two ways. One of them is the government’s commitment to eliminate them. People believe that authoritarian leaders have inexhaustible political capital. In fact, they have to choose their battles. Xi’s decision to make controlling history one of his most sensible priorities shows that he believes it matters. In his speeches, he explicitly opposed the tendencies of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed complaints about the history of the component as a component of his policy of glasnost, or openness. Xi said that by allowing the denunciation of the history of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s moves led to the country’s ideological collapse. According to Xi’s analysis, this is the main explanation for why the Soviet Union collapsed and why the CCP will have to eliminate unofficial historians.
The recent White Paper protests show that such undercurrents can have political repercussions, creating arguably the biggest challenge to the party since the Tiananmen protests in 1989. It was around this time that writers like Jiang became incredibly popular on Chinese social media. Early in his career, he had written a lengthy essay for Spark magazine and other articles examining popular unrest in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War era. His 2022 and 2023 works based on those reports were banned through censorship, but have been published and republished many times.
As China faces difficult issues on many fronts—slow growth, demographic problems, and a tense foreign policy environment—events such as the white paper protests may be less outliers than harbingers of a new, more volatile time. But they also suggest that ordinary Chinese citizens may increasingly be ready to question the official narratives about their country’s past and develop new understandings of the forces that are shaping the country’s present and its future.