Sparks
- Author Ian Johnson
- Narrator Ian Johnson
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 12 hours and 12 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Asian history, Control, privacy and safety in society, Far-left political ideologies and movements, History, Political control and freedoms, Politics and government, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, Society and Social Sciences.
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What to expect
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
Critics Review
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Ian Johnson is one of the most experienced and thoughtful Western journalists writing about China. Now he has turned his attention to one of the most important battles in contemporary China: the struggle to control history … Moving and full of human character and detail. It’s a compelling read, beautifully written, and the product of deep research carried out in China over many years … an exemplary tribute.
Literary Review -
A striking account … This immersive survey combines interviews, firsthand reportage, and historical research to paint a moving group portrait of China’s political dissidents.
Publishers Weekly -
An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read, Sparks is alive with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably, refuse to let their histories be forgotten. It’s a privilege to read books like these.
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 -
A powerful narrative of how the human spirit has survived the cruel repression of Maoist totalitarianism and is still doing the same against Xi Jinping’s determined efforts to impose a new form of digital totalitarianism … A must read for anyone interested in the Chinese and China.
Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies
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