In November 2012, two weeks after taking over as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping took his top officials to the National Museum of China, a vast Stalinist edifice on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square. The new general secretary led the group through the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, where they studied the approved version of history, detailing the country’s supposed salvation from the ruins of empire under the party’s wise stewardship. Xi viewed control of the past as an existential issue. He believed the Soviet Union’s collapse had been in part precipitated by the leadership’s failure to defend its founding myths and he was determined not to repeat that mistake. In the months that followed, party officials were ordered to wage an “intense struggle” in the ideological sphere and to combat what he called “historical nihilism”.
The consequences for historical scholarship in China over the decade since have been devastating. The authorities introduced new laws to protect the CCP’s heroes, banned books, harassed scholars, and shut down independent journals. But as the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson argues in Sparks, the victory for the regime’s repressive apparatus was not total. Instead, new digital technology has enabled a brave group of independent film-makers, writers and artists to preserve an alternative version of the country’s history and to stubbornly resist the party’s efforts to rewrite the past.
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