Sparks by Ian Johnson

Sparks by Ian Johnson

Author:Ian Johnson [Johnson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00


Compared to counter-historians such as Ai Xiaoming, Remembrance is more academically oriented. Its articles are footnoted and strive for objectivity. And it seeks to interact with international scholars who work on similar topics. But like Ai and other people based in China, its writers are motivated by personal experience.

For Wu Di, it came when he was a 17-year-old, in 1968. Like most other young people from that era, he was exiled to the countryside, a move that allowed Mao to restore control after the anarchic early phase of the Cultural Revolution. Wu was sent to Inner Mongolia and lived among the herders and horsemen of the great steppes north of Beijing. One day, a man in his tent was robbed and another falsely accused of it. Wu spoke out in favor of the accused and was immediately arrested.

He was thrown into a jail cell about the length of a living room filled with twenty men. They were accused of having organized a plot for Mongolian independence centered around the ethnic Mongolian communist leader, Ulanhu. After a month, Wu was reassigned to a cell with just two men. The men were also accused of being part of the plot but were considered suicidal. Wu2 was ordered to make sure the men didn’t take their lives.

“At first, I was just excited to be away from the overcrowded cell and didn’t care about the men,” he said. “But then I began talking to them and started to learn about the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia.”

When he eventually returned to Beijing, he got a university education, became a teacher, and explored the outside world through foreign films, which became his specialty. He published widely on the topic, including an amusing book on foreign and Chinese cinema, which could be translated as East-West: Apples and Oranges.

Yet the memories of his youth stayed with him. He knew he had witnessed history and he spent the 1980s carefully writing down what he had heard, corroborating information with eyewitnesses. A key finding was the degree of ethnic hatred that underlay the violence. Official figures show that during the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia 22,900 died and 790,000 were imprisoned, but there was no atonement and no discussion of the fact that most of the perpetrators were ethnic Chinese or that the victims overwhelmingly were Mongolians. Wu’s conclusion was that this unresolved era continues to underlie ethnic tensions in the region.

But the manuscript was unpublishable and there was no Remembrance to get even the gist of it published in China. It lay in Wu’s desk drawer, a fading memory of the windswept Mongolian steppes.



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