What Would Chinese Democracy Look Like?

With the recent release of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson presents a tantalizing vision of what controversies over history might look like in other countries. But this vision is only tantalizing as Johnson, like so many other contemporary China watchers, never stops to seriously consider what the baseline belief of Chinese people is about their own history.

Spark is the name of an obscure political magazine from the late 1950s that saw its members meet unfortunate fates as a result of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Johnson posits that Spark, alongside contemporary such versions of it in the forms of obscure academic-style documentaries, represent China’s underground history, a negative vision of China’s past which he compares to various anecdotes in Chinese antiquity of artists and other brave persons speaking truth to power before the powers silenced them. In Johnson’s interpretation, it’s only a matter of time before the tyranny of Chinese Communism ends and China sees such persons as Ai Xiaoming in a similarly positive retrospective light.

Xiaoming is an intriguing figure, who Johnson describes as becoming a viral sensation for protesting the arrest of an activist who uncovered sexual abuse at a school in China. Someone took a picture of her topless holding a pair of scissors with her body covered in calligraphy. Johnson describes this as one of the best known protest pictures in decades. I haven’t had any luck finding it. The lack of any searchable information about the sexual-abuse case in question certainly doesn’t help.

We presumably know Xiaoming better known for her work as a documentarian than for disseminating semipornographic pictures, but Johnson largely leaves us to take his word for this. I was able to find an English language version of her most recent documentary, Jiabiangou Elegy, though it no longer exists on YouTube. But be warned, that even if you do find it, this documentary is seven hours long, and is mostly just interviews with survivors of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Jiabangou Elegy not exactly being watchable rather begs the question–is Ai Xiaoming really any more influential than any average academic, in any country? If the Chinese government weren’t censoring her, would people be much more likely to watch films and history like this?

Johnson would have his readers believe that, thanks to the Communist Party of China, no one in the country has ever heard anything negative about the Anti-Rightist Campaign, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. This isn’t an idea Johnson invented- it’s endemic to most discussion of China in English. So I was more than a little surprised to find such topics commonly discussed and even criticized in my recent Master’s Program in China Studies at Zhejiang University.

Now, you might think this might not be a reasonable sample size for media dissemination in China at large, and you’d be right. This is one of the few places where popular culture studies is actually significant, since more than proper history classes, this is how people tend to absorb their history in our multimedia age. Johnson is badly in need of such analysis, but presents none.

But I’ve already noted how The Three Body Problem contains large, extended sections about the Cultural Revolution critical to the backstory, and equally critical of how cruelly these troubled times were to people from politically suspect families. Television series oriented to more realistic historical settings aren’t much nicer. Like A Flowing River deals heavily with the economic reforms of the late seventies and onwards, contrasting new policy with the old and explicitly opening up with the main character facing prejudice in college applications due to his family background. Paranoia on the part of older characters about running afoul of the government is a constant theme.

What all of this goes to show is that, in common perception, Chinese people understand that the government they live under has changed significantly since Mao’s time. Johnson not only obfuscates time in his analysis of the Communist Party of China, but also space. He’s dismissive of the idea that regional polities in China wield significant power, and that this can explain to a significant extent why some parts of the country faced more gruesome experiences than others aside from sheer arbitrary cruelty. In a famine that claimed 40 million people, Johnson gives the impression that cannibalism was omnipresent by focusing on obscure, censored narratives. But the problem this creates, which Johnson doesn’t address, is why China’s mistakes point to the illegitimacy rather than the incompetency of its government.

Johnson argues, indirectly, that Western societies are more free because we openly discuss past mistakes. While this is true, virtually no one who discusses the past crimes of, say the United States in the Vietnam War suggests that the fact that the war happened at all means that we should overthrow the United States government. He acknowledges that foreign political interference motivates much Chinese censorship, while also suggesting that fears of foreign political interference are the overblown disingenuous rationalizations of an autocratic state. This argument may have seemed credible ten years ago, but is difficult to take seriously after seven years of Russiagate.

What Johnson even means by autocratic is even harder to pin down. At one point he provides scholar Wu Guoguang’s definition of documentary politics as an example of China’s antidemocratic tendencies. By this definition, leadership by the Chinese president is not democratic because Chinese white papers, which are created through a long drafting and compromise process to reach a consensus position agreeable to most factions in the party, direct it. This isn’t democratic in the sense that it doesn’t involve an election, I guess.

It’s unclear, and possibly beyond the scope of the book, what Chinese democracy would look like. But the closest reference point, the Tiananmen Square Protests, are surprisingly undefined, mostly because all the underground historians Johnson profiles didn’t get involved, saying they weren’t sure what the protesters actually wanted. Many of them actually opposed Deng-era economic reforms, which the West saw as democratic. This confounds the issue to such an extent that good and evil binaries aren’t possible, so Johnson doesn’t address them.

I wish I could tell you more about the underground historians than these vague platitudes but Johnson just doesn’t get into them clearly enough, assuming an unreasonable amount of knowledge from even an educated reader. The reference to the fascist gargantua of Beijing is an especially specific bit of unexplained inside baseball. Maybe not everyone wants a primer on early aughts-era Beijing urban planning policy, although I’d prefer anything with more concrete details than Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.