China’s Underground Historians, With Ian Johnson

LINDSAY:
Before we begin, I want to flag another great CFR podcast. It's called Why it Matters. It returns to the airwaves this month hosted by the Council's Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Why it Matters, simplifies complicated global topics and brings them home to you. The show airs every two weeks and features a diverse array of topics and guests, check it out.

Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is China's underground historians. 

With me to discuss how Chinese filmmakers, journalists, and artists are challenging the Communist Party's version of China's history is Ian Johnson. Ian is the Stephen A. Schwartzman Senior Fellow for China studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. A journalist by training, ian won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China for the Wall Street Journal. His extensive writings include several books, including one that hit bookstore shelves today, Sparks: China's Underground Historians In Their Battle For The Future. Ian also has a provocative piece in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs titled "Xi's Age Of Stagnation." Ian, congratulations on the publication of Sparks and your Foreign Affairs article, and thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox.

JOHNSON:
Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to be on the show.

LINDSAY:
Now, Ian, before we begin discussing how the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on history is being challenged from below, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of Sparks. To do so, please go to CFR.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that, CFR.org/giveaway. There you can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register your entry. Registration for the giveaway will remain open until October 10th. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of Sparks. And for any listeners struggling to find a pen or pencil to jot down this information, please note that we have provided a link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on CFR.org.

Now, with all of those logistics out of the way, Ian, let's talk about China and the battle over Chinese history. Now, history is a battleground in most countries. Right here in the United States we're having active debates about the right way to teach history and what the lessons of history might be. But as I read the opening chapter of Sparks, my impression was that you see history's role in China as perhaps even more important than it is in lots of other countries because history in China is a key to political power. Help me understand that.

JOHNSON:
I think there are two reasons for that. One is historical, that for centuries, even millennia, dynasties in China based their right to rule on how history perceived them. Each dynasty would rewrite the previous dynasty's history and show that that dynasty fell into corruption and that the new dynasty had to take over power from the old dynasty, and that's why it was allowed to rule the country. That is something that the Communist Party inherited, and it's something that it actively has pursued. And basically the story is the Nationalists who ruled China from the end of the last dynasty that fell in 1911 until the end of the Civil War in 1949, that they were corrupt and that the Communists had to come in and only the communists can run China. And in this telling, there were patriots that tried to save China in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, good well-meaning people, but it was only the-

LINDSAY:
Like Sun Yat-sen, for example.

JOHNSON:
Yeah, like Sun Yat-sen or even earlier than that. But it was only the Communists that were able to kick out the foreigners, put China back on its feet, and even fight the United States to a standstill in the Korean War, and do all these kinds of things that Chinese patriots and sort of dreamed of, giving China back its territorial integrity. And indeed some of these accomplishments are real, but in this telling of history, only the party can run China and anything else will lead to disaster. So therefore, this leads the party to whitewash anything that is done in the past. And this includes the world's greatest famine, the world's greatest recorded famine at least, with up to 45 million people dying in the late fifties and early sixties. And various crises over the past thirty or forty years. So political power in China really is based on history.

I think maybe the second reason, which is part of that is that almost all autocracies we see around the world tell this story that they have to run the country. Putin does the same thing. Russia was going into decline at the end of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin couldn't really keep the country together. Putin had to stand in and right the Russian ship. You see this in other countries as well. And so Xi Jinping by the same token, sort of says, "Only I can keep China on an even keel. Only I can help develop the country and make it rich and strong." And that's the basis, I think of Communist party legitimacy in China. It's certainly not a ballot box.

LINDSAY:
Well, certainly not, but I can see why the Chinese Communist Party wants to tell a story that says, "You need us for continued greatness." But my sense is that the party's definition of what is acceptable history has really constricted over the last decade or so. Whereas before that there had been some opening, some recognition of the serious errors that Communist party leaders had made. You mentioned the famine, but there's also the Cultural Revolution, space was opened up where people could acknowledge that reality. There's a wonderful science fiction book called The Three Body Problem, which begins by recounting an episode at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. My sense is now that that space has clammered up, why?

JOHNSON:
Yeah, it's a great point because at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the party recognized that it had made serious errors and it had to reverse course in a number of ways, and one of it was a better accounting for its mistakes. And even Xi Jinping's father was the sort of godfather of a very important historical journal that tackled all kinds of sensitive issues in the 1990s and 2000s. But over the past decade or so, under Xi Jinping, the party has viewed history as something that it needs to sort of control more forcefully, just as it needs to control civil society in China more forcefully. It has to reassert control over the historical narrative, so to speak.

And I think that this is because in the 2000s, thanks to digital technologies, there were more and more people on the internet writing blogs, publishing books who were challenging the Communist Party and saying, "Hey, look, there have been a series of disasters in China over the past five, six, seven decades and that we need to talk about this." And the party began to feel that this was challenging its legitimacy. And so under Xi, hand in hand with, again, crackdown on independent voices, they've cracked down on history as well.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk a bit about that because Sparks introduces readers to a number of documentary filmmakers, journalists, and artists who were challenging the Communist party's narrative of Chinese history. Tell me about some of those underground historians.

JOHNSON:
Right. These are people who refuse to go along with the state controlled story. And despite this increasing crackdown under Xi Jinping continue to make these underground publications which continue to spread around China. One of the more interesting examples is the name of the book, Sparks, which I take from a student run journal that was published in 1960. And I think this journal really gets to the heart of this movement because it didn't have a great shelf life. They only had a couple of issues of the magazine. These students saw the famine happening in China. They had a mimeograph machine that they had access to, and they wrote essays that challenged the state's control of all aspects of life and said, "This is the reason for the famine. It's not economic, it's because of state control over the economy and various things like that."

These students were arrested, thrown in jail, some were executed, and it seemed like this would just disappear. Until the late 1990s when some of the students who are now getting on to become older people, they were able to look into their police file at the end of the Cultural Revolution. They took photographs of all of these things that the police kept. And as you can imagine in an authoritarian bureaucratic state like China, they file everything.

LINDSAY:
They document everything. It's one of the fascinating things of authoritarian governments. Good record keepers.

JOHNSON:
They kept everything including love letters between some of the students and the original copies of the magazines. So these students were able to go back... Again, now they're in their sixties or so, and they made photos of this and it stayed in these circles of people until digital technologies took hold in the late nineties and early 2000s. And out of these photos, they made PDFs and began to email them to other people, and it went out of these small circles of people to the broader public. Admittedly not to all people in China obviously, but to other interested people. Hundreds of thousands of people now know about Sparks because of digital technologies.

And I think this work which has been publicized by some remarkable people, including one of the main characters in my book, a journalist named Jiang Xue who grew up in a town in northwestern China, a relatively poor small city called Tianshui where a lot of this took place, wasn't aware of it until somebody said, "Oh, you didn't hear about this? Let me email you a 500-page PDF," Which had all the documentary evidence including books, memoirs published by people. And so she got fascinated by it and wrote magazine articles which circulated in social media and among other people. There were documentary filmmakers who also made films about it as well, and it began to spread.

LINDSAY:
Well take the example of the citizen journalist Jiang. What was the motivation to do a curiosity, a desire to take on the Chinese Communist Party, a bid for fame? What's the motivation?

JOHNSON:
I think part of it like with all people, it starts with a personal story. And in her case, it was a story of her grandfather. Her grandfather died in the great famine in 1960 and he sacrificed himself, so his family that included his children. So Jiang Xue's father that they could survive. And this is a story that was passed down in the family and every Chinese New Year, the children had to go to his tomb and kowtow as thanks that they could survive. And that was for her a very important moment. And then when she realized that it wasn't just her family that had this tragedy, but it was part of this bigger tragedy that had befallen China in general, that she began to research it and look into the causes of it. And not just why the famine happened, but the authoritarian political state that is the same then as now. This is what say motivated her to look into these topics.

LINDSAY:
One of the fascinating people you write about is the documentary filmmaker, Ai Xiaoming tell me her story.

JOHNSON:
She was a person who grew up the granddaughter of a famous general in China. He had led the ill-fated defense of Nanjing, which ended in the Nanjing massacre, which was one of the great sort of horrible war-

LINDSAY:
Afflicted by the Japanese.

JOHNSON:
Committed by the Japanese. And he did not flee to Taiwan like many of the Nationalist generals, he stayed on. And she grew up in this strange household, which was at once privileged but also persecuted because he had been a general for the Nationalists. She went through the Cultural Revolution, joined the Communist party, she tried to make a clean break with her family passed, but over time she saw that there was, again, something wrong. She saw Tiananmen in 1989, the massacre in Beijing that took place against the sort of student-led demonstrations for more openness and democracy. 

And she began to make films in the early 2000s. Initially, it was spurred by a visit to the United States. She was a visiting scholar at the University of the South. She was a feminist scholar and very interested in a popular play called The Vagina Monologues. She taught this to her students. And then she asked a friend of hers who is a very famous filmmaker in China,, Hu Jie, to make a documentary of her students performing this play. And through him, she began to see that digital technologies allows kind of anyone to be a filmmaker. You don't need a giant heavy camera and tripods and lights and all this stuff. Of course nowadays with the size of a cell phone, but back then, twenty years ago, a handheld camera had image stabilization software and all this kind of stuff that allowed you to cut your own film, you didn't have to send it to be developed and so on. You could do it on your laptop. And so she began to learn from him. 

She was an avid film buff and she watched all the great documentary filmmakers from the West, especially people who made Holocaust films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Hôtel Terminus, all these great films. You could get a lot of these things as pirated DVDs in China at the time. And also when she was in the United States, she went to the library and every day would check out two to three films and watch these all night long at home and just take notes and see how documentary films were made. She started by going out and making films about social issues that she saw happening near her campus: the rape of a student, peasant protests in neighboring countrysides. And then she got more and more ambitious ending with a great six-hour-long documentary about a notorious labor camp in western China. So this shows, I think, the sort of development and the use of the digital technologies, which really made a lot of this possible.

LINDSAY:
I'm curious, Ian, what led you to want to write about these people's stories?

JOHNSON:
Well, when I first went to China in the 1990s, it was post Tiananmen and I sort of thought like a lot of people that the intellectuals or the educated elite in China had sort of failed and that if there was any change that was going to happen in China, it would be only at the grassroots. And so the first book I wrote on China was called Wild Grass, and it was about civil society groups sort of bottoms up organizations in the legal sphere and in the countryside. And I think those are still important, but I think it's also interesting to see how actually some of China's, if you want to call them intellectuals or just educated people who are interested in history, how they have persevered over the past decades and have made this amazing body of work, hundreds of books, memoirs, magazines, and that they continue to circulate.

And as I stayed in China through the 2010s and saw Xi Jinping take power, crack down, I found it remarkable that they could continue to do this and that their work continued to resonate with people. As we know, China is really tightly controlled, but when there are cracks in the system, as we saw last year in the Covid protests, protesters begin to look for alternative answers, alternative versions of reality. The party is clearly not telling the whole story, let's see who else is out there. And they avail themselves of software that allows them to bypass Chinese censorship. They jump over the Chinese firewall and-

LINDSAY:
These virtual private networks, VPNs.

JOHNSON:
Yes, through VPNs, virtual private networks, which are readily available in China.

LINDSAY:
But not legal.

JOHNSON:
They're not legal. And in the past I think there wasn't a huge need for them because when you have double-digit economic growth, most people are pretty content with their lot. But as social tensions grow, and I think the Covid protests was maybe a forerunner of what we'll see in the future, they begin to look elsewhere. And they look to these people to provide answers for why China is in the situation it is today. And I see great parallels to the famous Cold War, Eastern Central European writers say Kundera, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Miloš Forman the filmmaker who were also trying to provide answers for their societies. And many of the people in China today directly link to these other intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe and see them as role models.

LINDSAY:
Is there a parallel to Soviet dissidents in the use of samizdat?

JOHNSON:
Greatly so. Yeah, I sometimes use samizdat as a interchangeable term for these underground publications. Of course, back then that was created by typing and retyping magazines sometimes in triplicate or quadruplicate with carbon paper, right, that you put between the pages

LINDSAY:
Bringing back fond memories of stained fingers from carbon papering.

JOHNSON:
Yes. And those things were circulated in that way. Nowadays, it's by creating a PDF that you can simply email to somebody. So it's not digital technology in the sense of social media. Because as we know, social media can be controlled. And the internet, the way we imagined it in the 1990s isn't as powerful as we thought. You can't just post anything you want. It'll be closed down.

LINDSAY:
I was going to say, you can post it. It just won't stay up very long.

JOHNSON:
Yeah, it'll be taken down pretty quickly sometimes. But you can use simple digital technologies like memory sticks, thumb drives, whatever you want to call them, USB sticks, just to simply say, "Here's a couple of films I found. Take a look at it, put it in your computer." Or I can email it to you. Or I can use some kind of a downloading software cloud thing. Even in China, there's Baidu and these other companies provide cloud software. You can upload a film and download it and stuff like that. It's harder for censors to get ahold of that, and emailing things. It's a quite powerful tool actually.

LINDSAY:
My sense also is that these Chinese underground historians can share their digital copies with people outside of China because they're able to breach the firewall. And those people both serve as a repository for the information, but can also help share it.

JOHNSON:
In the past, dissidents who went abroad, exiled Chinese were pretty much cut off from China, and many of them were quite sad figures. People who had been giants in the democracy movements in the eighties and nineties would go abroad and they had zero impact back in China. And in some ways that was why the government exiled them. Yeah go ahead and live in New York or some other place like that.

LINDSAY:
They're cut off from the mainland.

JOHNSON:
They were cut off. And people back in China are enjoying double-digit economic growth, and there's really no need to look to them for answers. Nowadays, I think partly because of the spread of VPN software and just in general the digitalization of society and the growing problems inside China, we see a much more of a flow back and forth between exile groups and people inside China. So you'll see very often, as you mentioned, people will upload a video to YouTube or to Twitter. There was one Twitter handle called I Am Not Teacher Lee. You could then in China then download the videos off that. So there were a lot of people who took advantage of that during the protests last year against Covid to simply say, "Oh, I've taken a video of something to keep it safe. I'll upload it to Twitter or YouTube and other people can then download it."

LINDSAY:
But to go back to where we started, clearly over the last several years, if not the last decade, under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has tried to compress that space, limit the distribution of these materials. I know for a while Hong Kong was a great place for these underground historians to get their books printed and brought onto the mainland, but Hong Kong is now no longer a separate system. It's abiding by the rules set in Beijing. So how are these underground historians responding?

JOHNSON:
They're in touch more with people overseas. One of the magazines, for example, that I profile is called Remembrance. They used to be published just inside China and published in the sense of a PDF that was put together by Chinese academics. And every other week it would be sent out to hundreds of people who would send it out to other groups of people and eventually would reach thousands and thousands of people around China. Nowadays, they send it to academics in Texas actually, and they put it together, and they send it back and help distribute it that way. So there is more of a use of the Chinese exile community. Many people have been forced into exile from Xi's China. Hundreds of thousands of middle class people are also going abroad sort of in record numbers. This all helps buttress this kind of a scene inside China. So even though Hong Kong is gone, you still have communities in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, London, elsewhere, Tokyo, and Seoul that help out.

LINDSAY:
So as this happens, and as Xi's trying to sort of compress the allowable space and to restrict what can be said about Chinese history, it seems you're arguing that Xi is producing an ossification of Chinese society. You even have a Chinese term you used to describe it "neijuan," tell me about it.

JOHNSON:
Yeah. On the Foreign Affairs piece, I look at the kind of conditions that I think are growing inside China that will help make these underground historians even more relevant in the future. And that is a turn inward in China that has been pronounced over the past five, ten years as the government has really turned away from the policy of reform and opening that Deng Xiaoping started in the late 1970s, and which his handpicked successors Jiang Zemin in the 1990s and then Hu Jintao in the 2000s largely pursued. Obviously there were problems such as Tienanmen in 1989 and so on. But overall, there was a period of opening of interaction with the global community, a lot of collaboration among Chinese scientists and foreign scientists, joint ventures, foreign direct investment, all of this kind of stuff. The government has been slowly turning away from and pursuing in economic terms, a policy of import substitution. Everything's going to be made in China. Essentially, "We can go it alone. We don't really need foreign trade."

LINDSAY:
What do you think's driving this great walling off of China as you put it?

JOHNSON:
I think it's anxiety. It's the same intention that led the government under Xi Jinping in the early 2010s to crack down on dissent at home, they're also trying to cut China off from any potential challenge to the leadership abroad. And so I think that they don't really trust the global system, they feel that it's going to lead to instability. And again, I think this is a reaction to the 2000s when you had this rise of more independent journalism and blogs.

LINDSAY:
A fear of a loss of control?

JOHNSON:
Absolutely. A fear of loss of control. I think that's a perfect description of Xi Jinping's driving force in most of his policies, that he wants to make sure the Communist party stays in the saddle. As with many things, the harder you try to control things, the worse off you are. And that really a self-confident ruler or anybody, even a manager in a company or something like that, they rule with a lighter touch because they know that people want to follow the overall system, right? You don't have to control people's every movements if you trust that they are not out to get you. I think this is ultimately self-defeating and will lead to more problems inside China, the kind of problems that really led to the downfall of the East Bloc countries half a century ago.

LINDSAY:
So you're referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Xi Jinping is trying to create his own wall right now. You don't see it lasting?

JOHNSON:
Well, I think he's trying to do it in his own way. Obviously the Berlin Wall was a physical space and the comparison between East and West Germany is imperfect because there's not a West China that is three times the size of China, et cetera, et cetera. But he is trying in his own way to keep control. This didn't start directly under Xi Jinping, it started in the late 2000s. But under him, because he is a more forceful leader with more power concentrated in his hands, he's able to do it more effectively. And ultimately I think this cuts China off from the very things that have made it successful over the past forty odd years.

LINDSAY:
Do you see any signs that Xi is triggering a backlash among the Communist party elite? I recently read an article claiming that he met with retired senior party officials recently, and the word in the street is that he was chastised by many of his former colleagues. I don't know whether this is a true story or not, but I just wonder if you had any reaction to that.

JOHNSON:
I think those kind of reports have to be treated carefully because it's very hard to know what's going on behind the scenes. They are at least reflections of people who are dissatisfied with the system and who are therefore leaking stories like that to let's say the foreign press. Whether they're true or not, it's hard to evaluate. You have to wait for more things. But you see all kinds of strange things happening. Like he replaced the head of the rocket force inside the People's Liberation Army who he had handpicked to lead the force of just a few years ago. These kinds of things are signs of instability inside the system, but it will take a long time before we can really figure out what's going on.

But there's no doubt that he is in a lonely position. He has no peers really around him. He's surrounded by more and more yes men, and he doesn't have the same inputs, the same information. So I think we can see more problems like the Covid lockdowns, which were clearly also a result of an information deficit where he wasn't... Or whoever was making those calls, wasn't getting the feedback that they should have gotten from the system that they might've gotten ten years ago because of this information control.

LINDSAY:
So is your sense that Xi is in some sense resisting the dynamics of Chinese society and the rhythms of Chinese economy? I get a sense that prior Chinese leaders in some sense tried to go with the flow, if I could put it this way. I think you've referred to it as a phenomenon of adaptive authoritarianism to try to steer things but not control them. Xi seems to be taking a different approach. I know you have spoken about how he sort of abandoned the tradition of going out and expressing sympathy to Chinese citizens who've had something terrible befall them. Recently, apparently he's been talking a lot about how Chinese youth has to learn how to eat bitterness in the face of unemployment.

JOHNSON:
Yeah, that'll go over really well with people. "You should live just like it was in the Cultural Revolution when I had to live in a camp."

LINDSAY:
I was just wondering if it sounded better in Mandarin.

JOHNSON:
I don't know how that goes over with most young people today. I think he is pretty much cut off, and this is a result of decisions that were made to concentrate power in the top leader of China. So initially after the Cultural Revolution, they said, "We don't want another Mao, so we're going to divide power up among several people," you had a different person who was the president of China, who was the party secretary, who was the head of the military, who was the premier, et cetera. He had basically five different power groups inside China in the eighties, and then after Deng began to get old and he appointed Jiang Zemin, they said, "No, we need to concentrate power because I don't know if this guy, Jiang Zemin, for example, is going to be able to last, so let's make him not only the party secretary, but also the president, and head of the military."

So under Jiang, he was still constrained by elders in the party, but as these elders died off and then his successor came Hu Jintao and then his successor Xi Jinping, you have a person at the top with all this power and with no constraints, there are no elders sort of holding... There's no Deng Xiaoping telling Xi Jinping, "Hey, you need to cool it down. Or you need to consider things in a different light." So I think that the signs are that Xi's probably going to go further down this road of more idiosyncratic rule and this idea that probably he knows best.

LINDSAY:
Ian, what do you see as the lessons for the United States in what you are witnessing happening in China these days?

JOHNSON:
I think in terms of this trend, for example, this rise of underground historians who are challenging the Communist Party, there's a couple of things. One is we should realize that party control has its limits. We shouldn't always maybe buy the story that the party tells on the front pages of People's Daily every day that Xi Jinping controls everything. That's what he wants to believe, that's what the party wants the population to believe, but there are a lot of people who don't buy into the party's story and Xi Jinping's absolute control over China. We can see sort of the limits of party control over Chinese society, and maybe that also helps us understand that when we want to talk to Chinese, we're always wondering who should our interlocutors be? Should we even go to China? Should we allow our students to go or encourage our students to go to China?

I think that we should try to engage with China in some ways as much as possible, but engage with the kinds of people I profile in the book. The people who do exist in China, who have not all been eliminated, who have not all been silenced. I think that this is the kind of China that we have to recognize still exists and that needs our support. It's also sort of a message to universities and so on to try to invite more of these people to come over for fellowships and to talk for film festivals, to show their films, to show that there is another China out there. The other China that has not been silenced.

And I find it somewhat sort of annoying that in the Cold War we celebrated these people like Solzhenitsyn, and Havel, and Kundera, and Forman, and maybe they were also talking a language that was more understandable to us in a literal sense, but also in the sense that they were Europeans, et cetera, et cetera. But there are Chinese with the same visions who are producing works of equal scope, magnitude, ambition, who are there in China today, and we should go out and try to engage with them. We don't have to engage always with the authorities and so on, but let's try to bring them into the conversation as well. Not as victims necessarily, but as people who are trying to create a different vision for their country under very difficult circumstances.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Ian Johnson, Steven A. Schwartzman Senior Fellow for China studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ian, thanks as always for joining me.

JOHNSON:
It's been my pleasure.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode or a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.