Xi Jinping and China's ruling Communist Party have displayed a dogged obsession with controlling the historical narrative. But there's a group of underground historians fighting back.
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.
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 in the desert.
One is, they have been careful to stop their historical explorations around the year 1980. So they're not talking about Tiananmen Square or COVID or something like that. They're looking more at the Mao era... They don't go directly into the current era of Chinese politics, so that protects them to some degree.
Right now, one of the main people I write about, she quotes — there's a famous quote by Hannah Arendt that in dark times, any bit of light blinds us. And we don't know, is this just a candle flickering in the darkness or is this the blazing sun that will become important? And I think now there's a little bit of flickering, but what we don't know is what will happen in the future.
Do you think their actions in some way speak for a larger group, or to a larger group, and have an outsized impact?
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