In 1966, Song Binbin, a student leader at Beijing’s most elite high school, became an icon of China’s Cultural Revolution. On Aug. 18, Song climbed the rostrum at Tiananmen Square to pin a Red Guard armband on the 72-year old Mao Zedong’s sleeve. 

Song told Mao that her given name (彬彬) meant “gentle.” Mao suggested that Song change her name to Yaowu (要武), which means “militant.” The People’s Daily featured Song smiling radiantly as she talked to Mao. The next day, an article with the byline Song Yaowu proclaimed that “violence is truth.” 

Song was a student leader at her school when a group of students tortured and murdered their fifty year old teacher and mother of four, Bian Zhongyun.  In 2007, Chinese independent filmmaker, Hu Jie, who served for fifteen years in the Chinese air force, produced a graphic, disturbing documentary on Bian Zhongyun’s 1966 murder. A group of schoolgirls wrote slogans on teacher Biao’s clothing, shaved her head, stabbed her scalp with scissors, poured ink on her head, and beat her unconscious.  Hours later, the students carried Bian’s dead body away in a wheelbarrow.  

READ: What A New Book Says About Mozambique’s Fight Against Jihadi Terrorism

In the 1980s, Song Binbin emigrated to the United States, changed her name, became an American citizen, earned a Ph.D. from MIT and married a wealthy businessman. In 2014, Song, at the age of 68, returned to her old high school, where a bronze bust of Bian stands on a pedestal in a conference room. Bowing before the statue with several other classmates, Song read a written apology. She said she felt “eternal regret and sorrow” for her actions. 

Song’s apology was followed by a spate of other public apologies for Cultural Revolution atrocities, circulated online and recorded by filmmakers and journalists. This led to widespread discussion in China about how China should deal with its violent past. The Chinese Communist Party quickly censored most of this public discussion. The current president of China, Xi Jinping, calls alternatives to the state-sponsored narrative of Communist rule “historical nihilism.” For Xi, Chinese Communism is “the conclusion of history.” 

This means that the Chinese Communist Party must guard against “evils” such as revisionist histories, constitutionalism, civil society, a free press and universal values. Xi accuses those who question the Communist Party’s version of history of “removing the spinal cord” of the Chinese race.  

President Xi’s book, The Governance of China, echoes the state-sponsored version of Communist Party history. Xi reflects positively on the time he spent exiled in the remote town of Liangjihe during the Cultural Revolution. Xi lived in a flea-infested cave and suffered through bitter winters and hunger. He built dams, farmed corn, wheat and potatoes, and hauled coal and manure. 

This experience, Xi claims, bonded him with China’s common people and prepared him to be an empathetic ruler. Liangjihe is now a “red tourist” attraction where students can visit Xi’s old home and admire the well he built. Xi’s exemplary work earned him the title Model Youth. He spent his prize money on farming tools for local villagers. 

In “Sparks,” Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of the Chinese filmmakers and journalists who, at great risk to themselves, are defying the Communist Party in order to explore the dark episodes of Chinese communism. These underground historians work on their own time, at night, after years in prison, sometimes holed up in an apartment under 24-hour surveillance. 

“Sparks” is a tribute to an eight-page journal, Spark (星火), which a group of students published during the Great Leap Forward. The authors of Spark had been exiled to the countryside during the Great Leap Forward (1957-1959). They quickly saw that the policy of forced collectivization and industrialization was having catastrophic consequences, leading to mass starvation.  The students hoped that their journal would prompt Communist Party members to abolish their misguided experiment.  

The students spent eight nights secretly carving essays onto plates by hand. They ran off thirty copies of their eight-page journal using a mimeograph machine hidden in a sulfuric acid plant. They named the magazine after the Chinese proverb “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” Mao Zedong’s use of this expression gave it credibility. The students mailed Spark to high level officials in major cities where students had contacts. After the publication of the second issue of Spark, the students were rounded up and imprisoned. Three were executed.  

Very few people read Spark, but Johnson tells the story of the magazine’s surprising afterlife. In the 2000s, Hu Jie began making documentary films about the magazine and its writers. Hu has interviewed most of the magazine’s surviving writers and produced films to preserve the history of the publication. Hu told Johnson that when he began interviewing these writers, he realized that “everything I knew about history had been covered up, that the official history was complete nonsense. So I felt it was very important that these true words come out.” None of Hu’s films have ever been publicly shown in China. 

A poet named Lin Zhao, who contributed to Spark, was the subject of Hu’s 2004 film, “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul.” When Lin wasn’t handcuffed to chairs and beaten by guards, she wrote poems and essays on scraps of paper by piercing her finger with a hairpin and using her blood as ink. When she ran out of paper, she wrote on her clothing.  

With her blood, Lin drew images on prison walls of an incense burner and flowers. From 9:30 a.m. to noon each Sunday she held what she called grand church worship, singing hymns and saying prayers that she learned in her Methodist girls’ school. The prison guards put a tight-fitting hood on Lin that made it difficult for her to breathe and impossible for her to speak.  Lin was executed on April 29, 1968. On May 1, a Communist Party official visited Lin’s mother to demand that she pay a fee for the bullet used to kill her daughter.

Prison guards meticulously saved Lin’s writings to document her counter-revolutionary spirit. After Mao’s death, Lin’s files were declassified and sent to her family. 

In “Sparks,” we meet Ai Xiaoming, who interviewed dozens of survivors of the Jiabiangou forced labor camp and their families to make her seven hour documentary film, “Jiabiangou Elegy.”  Journalist Tan Hecheng uncovered the story of a Communist Party-led massacre of 9,000 innocent men women and children in Hunan Province that took place in 1967. Tan devoted forty years of his life to researching the story of the systematic murders, finally publishing a book, “The Killing Wind,” in 2010. 

“Documenting this wasn’t quixotic,” Johnson writes. “It was a hard nosed calculation that it would pay off–not for Tan personally but for his country.” 

“If communist heroes were not so heroic, if Mao wasn’t a gifted poet and thinker, if the Red Army hadn’t really defeated the Japanese invaders, if the party’s founding act of land reform had been a cruel mistake — then by what right does the Party rule?” Johnson asks. 

Dissident lives challenge the conventional wisdom of how we in the West are to view China. China has been written off as a string of “dystopian horrors,” including 24-hour surveillance, cultural genocide, organ harvesting, and aggressive nationalism. Johnson shows us a different China. Johnson considers today’s dissidents to be part of the Chinese tradition of jiang hu (rivers and lakes; 江湖). Jiang hu is a wild region beyond the reach of the government where righteousness (义) holds sway.  

Most of the artists Johnson interviews know that their works will never be shown in today’s China. All of them know they are risking their lives and their freedom in order to bear witness to the truth. They persist because they want to create a record for future generations, an “ark that will survive the current flood.” 

Independent journalist Jiang Xue finds solace for her lonely pursuit in these verses composed by the eighth century poet Liu Zongyuan: 

An old man in his raincoat

In a solitary boat

Fishes alone in the freezing

River snow

Solitary struggle, holding out, alone on a boat, facing immense trials. This, for Jiang Xue, characterizes the life of an underground historian in China today. 

Some of the material in this essay was published in The Public Discourse.  

Robert Carle was a professor of theology at The King’s College in Manhattan from 1999 to 2023; professor.carle@gmail.com. Dr. Carle has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the American Interest, Newsday, Society, Human Rights Review, the Public Discourse, Academic Questions, and Reason.