Who Gets to Tell China’s Story?

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 “The Chinese Amnesia,” an essay that explained why tragedies kept befalling China. The Chinese Communist Party, he contended, controlled history so thoroughly that the vast majority of people remained unaware of its endless cycles of violence. The result was that people knew only what they personally experienced, making them susceptible to the CCP’s indoctrination campaigns: “In this manner, about once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society,” Fang observed. “This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of ‘Forgetting History.’”

For many people who analyze China today, Fang’s way of seeing China has become dominant. They argue that the party’s control of history is more powerful than ever because it is now backed by an even more powerful, technocratic state led by a leader fully committed to whitewashing the past. Meanwhile, a vast surveillance state keeps an eye on anyone with alternative views of the past or the present. China’s amnesia seems complete.

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 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 tools have proved to be the modern-day weapons of the weak, allowing for the rise of a group of people who confront the government on its most important source of legitimacy: its mythlike telling of history. In the party’s fabled account of the past, the CCP took power in the mid-twentieth century to save China and continues to run the country because of its largely unblemished record. In promoting this narrative, the party has huge advantages, including a monopoly on television, film, publishing, and school curricula. And yet this has not prevented citizen historians from continuing to defy the state even today, during the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has made the control of history one of his signature policies.

Events such as last year’s “white paper” protests against the COVID lockdowns and a slowing economy show how large groups of Chinese people can see through the government’s self-serving accounts of the past. Government propagandists can flood the media with their version of reality or slow down unwanted information. This sophisticated form of censorship means that most people still agree with the government’s version of events. Yet enough people now have access to alternative interpretations to prompt widespread and persistent questioning of the government. The party’s increasingly draconian efforts to control history prove the potency of this insurgency, which Xi sees as a life-and-death struggle that the party must win at all costs.

TOTAL RECALL

Since the Mao Zedong era, the CCP has used myths to explain the recent past. The worst disaster in the history of the People’s Republic was the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, which killed up to 45 million people, or about 20 times the number who died during the Cultural Revolution. Officially, however, what is called the “Three Difficult Years” is reckoned to have killed only a few million people and only because of natural disasters and the pullout of Soviet advisers. The party, in other words, is blameless. And yet this distorted view of history is dismissed by almost any important historian at home or abroad, not to mention the people who lived through it. They know that the famine was due to Mao’s delusional economic policies, which forced farmers to pursue fanciful agricultural and industrial strategies that destroyed years of harvests.

Until recently, however, this discrepancy was not 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 touchstone of this counterhistory movement is a 1960 student magazine called Spark. It was founded by students who had been caught up in a 1950s campaign against China’s educated class and exiled to western China. There they saw the effects of the Great Famine firsthand: cannibalism, mass starvation, and officials too terrified of Mao to report the truth. They founded the magazine in hopes of arousing opposition to one-party rule, publishing articles against despotism, the lack of free expression, and the powerlessness of China’s farmers.

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed how historical memory is preserved and spread.

Soon after Spark was launched, however, the authorities closed it down and confiscated all copies of the magazine. Forty-three people were arrested; three were executed and the rest sent to labor camps. After Mao died in 1976 and relative moderates took power, the party made partial amends for the excesses of that era. Some people were permitted to look into their personnel file, or dang’an, a dossier that the state keeps on each person, containing everything from high school grades to police records. One of the students involved in the magazine, Tan Chanxue, was able to look at her files in the 1980s and saw that—in good bureaucratic form—the authorities had dutifully kept copies of everything used to convict her. That included copies of the magazine, the confessions of all the students, and even the love letters that she had written to her boyfriend, who had been a driving force behind the magazine and who was executed in 1970.

Tan made photos of all the material, but for years it remained in her apartment. Then came the 1990s, when friends used the photos to make PDFs. That re-created Spark in a digital format and allowed people to learn about the students’ prescient critique of one-party rule. It also allowed people to share the hundreds of pages of police documentation of the students, inspiring independent Chinese filmmakers, journalists, and public thinkers to make movies, write books, and comment on the students and their magazine. Memories that had once been personal became collective memories—not for all Chinese but for a significant number of people, many of whom were highly educated and influential.

Over the past two decades, this rediscovery of the past and creation of new historical knowledge has been repeated numerous times. Hundreds of books now dispute the party’s past and are widely available online, while videographers make ambitious documentary films and oral histories to preserve voices that once would have been lost.

LEARNING TO SPEAK

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 by his wife, Li Yinhe, who is known as one of China’s leading experts on sexuality. She has researched and written about China’s gay and lesbian movement and in recent years has stood up for transgender and bisexual citizens. The two met in 1979 and married the next year. In 1984, the couple went to the University of Pittsburgh, where Li earned a doctorate and Wang a master’s degree. When they returned to China in 1988, Li eventually took a position at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Wang taught history and sociology at Renmin and Peking Universities.

At the time of the 1989 student movement, Wang was silent about the protests. He had been scarred by the Cultural Revolution and was unsure about the amorphous movement. Who was leading it? What were its goals? Like many of his generation, he was wary of large, sometimes chaotic movements. Staying silent became the theme of Wang’s most famous essay, “The Silent Majority.” Wang described how the Mao era had silenced people by the ubiquity of the great leader: his thoughts, his ideas, and his words rained down day and night. That had left a scar, which for Wang meant, “I could not trust those who belonged to the societies of speech.” The struggle to find a voice became a personal quest for Wang and an allegory for China as a whole.

This is what drew Wang to study gay communities in China. Disadvantaged groups were silent. They had been deprived of a voice. Society sometimes even denied their existence. Then Wang had an epiphany: much of Chinese society was voiceless—not only people with a different sexual orientation but students, farmers, migrants, miners, people living in historic urban districts about to be torn down, and so on. These were not just members of a few special interest groups but represented a huge swath of Chinese society. “These people keep silent for any number of reasons,” he wrote. “Some because they lack the ability or the opportunity to speak, others because they are hiding something, and still others because they feel, for whatever reason, a certain distaste for the world of speech.” He added, “As one of them, I have a duty to speak of what I have seen and heard.”

In fact, Wang had been shocked by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and had questioned his own failure to support the protesters. But he came to believe that the protesters, as noble as they might have been, had represented an older way of doing things that he could no longer support. They saw themselves as classic intellectuals who wanted to influence the state and were angry that they had been ignored. Wang saw society differently. He believed its core problem was that it was fractured into groups that were too weak to oppose the overwhelming power of the one-party state. This was why China was silent. Finally, he realized that he had to write about these groups and not become another privileged intellectual.

FROM THE GROUND UP

Wang became a prominent public intellectual who wrote prolifically for the Chinese media. Although he died just five years later, in 1997, of a heart attack at age 44, he influenced a generation of people. One is the feminist scholar and underground filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, whose films explore disadvantaged groups in Chinese society, such as farmers, rape victims, and labor camp inmates. Others, such as the writers Yan Lianke and Liao Yiwu, also began describing the most vulnerable members of society, such as prison inmates and victims of the Mao era. One of China’s greatest filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, often mentions Wang as the writer who inspired him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state.

Wang himself was influenced by many thinkers. As a youngster growing up in Mao’s China, he secretly read the works of Bertrand Russell and internalized his idea of personal liberty. In Pittsburgh, he also read Michel Foucault and his description of power relations between individuals and the state. Besides influencing Wang’s thinking, Foucault is also useful in explaining Wang’s own role in Chinese society. Foucault describes how many intellectuals have moved from pontificating on classic universal themes—freedom, morality, existence—to specific areas in which they possess specialized knowledge. Using this expertise, they can intervene effectively in public debates, often on behalf of vulnerable groups, such as the poor, immigrants, or sufferers from HIV/AIDS.

In the West, this began in the mid-twentieth century, but in China, it was possible only with the digital revolution. In the decade after Wang’s death, citizen historians flourished, thanks not only to PDFs and cheap digital cameras but also—for a few years—to a relatively unfettered Internet. That allowed blogs, bulletin boards, and social media to thrive, giving many of these unofficial voices a platform.

The rise of Xi Jinping was part of a backlash against that era of openness. He cracked down on wayward party members, nongovernmental organizations, and discussions of public policy. But one of his overriding interests has been the control of history. In 2013, Xi banned criticism of the Mao era. In 2016, he purged the leading counterhistory magazine, China Through the Ages—even though his father, Xi Zhongxun, a high-ranking official himself, had strongly supported it. And in 2021, the Chinese government rewrote the guidelines on how history should be portrayed, further concealing key events such as the Cultural Revolution.

And yet even amid this growing effort to control the past, the work of citizen historians continues apace. While some of the most prominent of them, such as the filmmakers Ai and Hu Jie, have been harassed, others continue to work. The most influential underground history magazine, Remembrance, has published continually as a PDF since 2008; it recently published its 245th issue.

Not coincidentally, among these “grassroots intellectuals” it is easier to find female voices, such as Ai, the poet Lin Zhao, and the writer Jiang Xue, and minority voices, such as the imprisoned Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti and the Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser. Voices such as theirs were often excluded from the mainstream circles that came from the male-dominated Confucian tradition of ethnic Chinese intellectuals or the macho world of big-name Chinese fiction writers. In his essay describing his personal journey, Wang described another difference with the world of traditional public thinkers. Citizen intellectuals and historians were not part of the Confucian tradition, with its often patronizing concern for the country or the people, but were motivated to act for personal reasons. “The one I wish to elevate the most is myself,” he writes. “This is contemptible; it is also selfish; it is also true.”

Wang shares this motivation with other grassroots thinkers. The journalist turned historian Yang Jisheng watched his foster father die of starvation during the Great Famine and decided that his life’s work would be documenting that terrible upheaval. The video blogger Tiger Temple worked as a child forced laborer on a railway in the 1960s and later decided to document that history. Ai saw women being oppressed. Jiang learned about her grandfather’s death by starvation and began to research the famine. More recently, many suffered because of the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and began to document their experiences. This response can be seen as narrow or parochial, but as Wang recognized, it is also how societies change: by people trying to understand and describe their own lives.

Chinese citizens may increasingly question the official narratives about their country’s past.

The impact of these underground historians can be measured in two ways. One is the government’s commitment to stamping them out. People often imagine that authoritarian leaders have endless political capital. In fact, they have to choose their battles. Xi’s decision to make the control of history one of his top priorities shows that he feels that it is important. In speeches, he has explicitly spoken out against trends in the 1980s Soviet Union, when its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed criticism of the party’s history as part of his policy of glasnost, or openness. Xi has said that by allowing criticism of the Soviet Union’s history, Gorbachev's actions led to the country’s ideological hollowing out. This, in Xi’s analysis, is the key reason why the Soviet Union collapsed—and why the CCP must stamp out unofficial historians.

The recent white paper protests show that these undercurrents can have political repercussions, creating arguably the biggest challenge to the party since the 1989 Tiananmen protests. It was in this period that writers such as Jiang became extremely popular on Chinese social media. Earlier in her career she had written a long essay on the magazine Spark and other pieces examining popular unrest in central and Eastern Europe in the Cold War era. Her works in 2022 and 2023 drawing on these experiences were banned by censors but were posted and reposted hundreds of time.

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.