A unique set of meticulous diaries, written by communist party member and reformist Li Rui, the secretary of Mao Zedong, have emerged in legal battles. Stanford University obtained them from Li’s daughter, but China is eager to get them back. Historian Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, comments on the diaries and fears they will disappear into the black hole Beijing’s archives are nowadays, he tells at ABC News.Read More →

Independent Australia reviews Ian Johnson’s latest book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future and supports his effort to avoid pressure from the government to forget the past. “Johnson gives us access to some of the recent events that have already been obliterated from Communist China’s official history, from the murderous disasters of Mao’s crackdowns on critical thinking to the cult rise of Xi Jinping.”Read More →

Why is China calling itself a democracy when it is not according to most definitions? China scholar Ian Johnson, a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, discusses this and other political issues at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the same way, it is not a dictatorship where Xi Jinping can decide on all issues in the country, he says.Read More →

China veteran Ian Johnson, author of China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (September 2023), announces he will leave as senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and move from New York to Berlin. He will work as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and work from Berlin starting on July 1, 2024, writing a new book on the misuses of religion in Xi’s China in the summer of 2024.Read More →

Foreign media too often focus on China’s crackdown on religion, but former foreign correspondent Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, sees an opposite trend as China’s government started to support traditional faiths, in an effort to gain new legitimacy, he writes in the Council on Foreign Relations. Read More →

During the Cold War, authors from Eastern Europe and Russia belonged to household names among Western elites, but today translations of their Chinese counterparts failed to make it to Western bookshelves, says Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. One of the reasons is the changed commercial business models of publishing houses, he says in an extensive interview in China Law & Policies.Read More →

Journalist and author Ian Johnson discusses his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, on why and how he came to write his book. Questions are asked by Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York and Glenn Tiffert a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China.Read More →

Book reviews of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by China veteran and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson start to come in, rightfully, like this overview in Public Discourse by Robert Carle. “In Sparks, Ian Johnson tells the stories of people such as Lin Zhao and Hu Jie—Chinese journalists and filmmakers who explore the darkest episodes of Chinese communism, often at great risk to themselves.”Read More →

China veteran and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson discusses his newest book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future with Bao Pu at City Lights Live. First question: who are the underground historians? And how do they survive in China’s system and challenge the state’s efforts to whitewash its history.Read More →