The NY Times published a really excellent article yesterday titled “China Keeps Trying to Crush Them. Their Movement Keeps Growing.” It’s a story about Chinese communism and the people who, often at great cost to themselves, have refused to obey the authoritarians in power. It starts in the days of the Mao and the Great Famine when a group of young people decided to write about what was really happening.

In 1959, a group of university students in the northwestern Chinese city of Tianshui embarked on a quixotic plan. China was in the midst of the Great Famine, a catastrophe caused by government policies that would kill as many as 45 million. These young people had witnessed farmers starving to death and cannibalism; they also saw how the government had brutally punished or killed people who appealed for help. They felt someone needed to do something to spread word of what was happening. They decided to publish a journal.

The students called it Spark, after a Chinese expression, “xinghuo liaoyuan,” or “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” They hand-wrote the essays onto plates and, with the help of local officials, used a mimeograph machine to run off copies.

At just eight pages, and with no photos or graphics, Spark looked primitive. But it was filled with articles that got to the heart of China’s authoritarian politics — then and now: Farmers weren’t allowed to own property, all of which belonged to the state; top leaders brooked no opposition; corruption was endemic; and even critics loyal to the regime were persecuted. The lead article on the first page set the tone…

There would be no second issue. Within months, 43 people associated with the magazine were arrested. Three were later executed, and the rest were sentenced to years in labor camps.

It was a brave idea but the communists crushed it almost out of memory. Enter underground historian and writer Jiang Xue. She grew up in the town where Spark was published and she remembers as a child being told every year about her grandfather.

Jiang Xue’s grandfather Zhang Rulin, his wife and their four children received a daily ration of one large corn bun to split among them. Zhang Rulin could see that they would starve, and so he made a decision: One of them would have to die so that the others could have enough to survive. But how to choose, and how to make the others go along with this sacrifice?

Jiang Xue tells the story the way her father did on every Chinese New Year’s Eve when she was a little girl:

“Grandfather was a just man. Every day he would take a knife and cut the bun into six equal pieces. One for each person. Each one the same. He weighed each piece on a scale. My youngest aunt — she was 1 year old — she got the same as her father. But he needed more. He was the only laborer in the family. But everyone got the same. They all survived. He starved to death. He sacrificed his life for us.”

Despite growing up with these stories and despite living in the same place, Jiang Xue had never heard of Spark. She eventually became a journalist, was successful in her field but quit in 2014 after an editor told the entire staff that no one should write any story critical of the government. She became a freelance writer who wrote things like this:

In my circle of friends, there were posts expressing discontent over the real-name registration for buses. One friend posted: “Go take a look at Xinjiang or Tibet. Everything’s already like this, or much worse.” I couldn’t help but feel my conscience stirred. Certainly, you and I might get very wound up about this, but people living in those places got used to it long ago.

How did it reach this point? You realize that in the last two or three years, the various kinds of censorship in everyday life have become more and more numerous. You have to verify your identity for this, register for that, and everywhere, you notice that you’re under scrutiny. It’s like Big Brother in Orwell’s novel “1984,” with the omnipresent viewscreens quietly nearby, attentive to every outward detail of your life.

The real-name registration for inter-province buses is a “counter-terrorism requirement.” Turns out we’re all terrorist suspects.

And sometime in 2016 she learned about Spark.

One day, a professor visiting from another city asked her if she had heard of the publication. She hadn’t and was surprised to hear that it had originated in her hometown, Tianshui. That evening, the professor did something that would have been impossible for previous generations of public intellectuals: He emailed her a 500-page PDF of documents about the case, including a book of memoirs published in Hong Kong and the police confessions extracted from the students. Later, she even found love letters between two of the publication’s main writers. She was surprised that no one had written about it in depth for a general audience.

She spent years researching, traveling at her own expense to interview the people who were involved in producing spark (the ones still alive). In 2019 she published an extremely long profile (28,000 words) about Spark in a Hong Kong magazine. Of course, that’s something that probably wouldn’t be possible today. Since 2019, the mainland has cracked down on freedom in Hong Kong.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to the article but the general idea is that even now in China there are still some people willing to speak up in opposition to one-party communist rule. They can’t be published and have to remain underground for their own safety, but they do exist and they still have plenty of readers. There are other writers, filmmakers, etc. who are still working in this underground space. We just haven’t heard of most of them because the communist party wnats it that way.

The people doing this work are worth knowing for their own sake. They are making works of scope and ambition equal to the great writers or filmmakers of the Cold War — people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera and Milos Forman. It is worth remembering that many of these giants of Eastern Bloc intellectual life had a limited impact for many decades. It was only when these countries began sliding into economic stagnation that ordinary people began to seek alternative ways of understanding the past as a way to assess the future.

Here’s hoping a similar future arrives in China sooner than we expect, a future where the CCP is a discredited failure and the people who told the truth about it are household names.