Based on years of first-hand research, award-winning journalist Ian Johnson’s new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (2023) 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. In this talk Johnson will share highlights from the book, which describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.
This event is co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service Asian Studies Program, Center for Asian Law at Georgetown Law, and Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.
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Ian Johnson is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lived more than 20 years in China as a student, journalist, and teacher. His work appears regularly in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, and other publications, and for five years he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Asian Studies. He has won numerous prizes for his coverage of China, including a Pulitzer Prize.