An interview with China historian Ian Johnson, founder of the China Unofficial Archives.

“One of the great myths about today’s China is that independent thought has been crushed.”

By Filip Noubel | Global Voices

The full text for this interview by Global Voices appears below in its original form, unaltered.

Chinese president Xi Jinping has declared a monopoly on narratives not only about today’s China but also about its ancient and more recent past. In that process, any diverging narrative or piece of historical testimony that could contradict the grand official narrative is erased and censored. Yet, historical memory has managed to survive in Chinese society to this day.

Global Voices interviewed China historian Ian Johnson via email after a meeting in Berlin to understand the importance of censored history and why it is essential to make it accessible to sinophone communities around the world.

Born in Montréal, Johnson, as he explains, was exposed to the value of multilingualism and eventually moved to the US, where he got his first job in journalism. He has lived mostly in Taiwan, Germany, and China. He describes his role as “trying to describe people’s lives by observing them closely and letting them speak as much as possible.” He launched The China Unofficial Archives, in Chinese 中国民间档案馆, as a US-registered non-profit in late 2023.

Filip Noubel (FN): Chinese authorities, from ancient times to today’s market-economy Communism have always paid special attention to history to justify their legitimacy and power. As a result, alternative or dissenting voices and materials have been regularly eliminated from mainstream public space. Is this why you decided to highlight censored content in your online archive? What are you hoping to achieve?

Ian Johnson (IJ): We want to make available to the general public the amazing outpouring of independent work that Chinese people inside China had done about their country’s history over the 75-year history of the People’s Republic. This includes books, magazines, blog posts, and documentary films, almost all of them banned inside China. We also have what we believe is the most comprehensive online database of independent Chinese thinkers. Our goal is non-ideological — we don’t endorse any particular item or person but try to present them with a neutral description in Chinese and English. To make research easier, each item or person is searchable by theme, era, or format.

Our target audience is people living inside China, who don’t have access to these works, but also we want to give people who can’t understand Chinese a sense of the works and the people who are involved in this movement.

FN: Your archive provides texts, images, and footage. How and where did you get such diverse material? What are the criteria for selecting and uploading such material?

IJ: Our single most important criterion is that our staff believes that the works are important — not that we endorse they but that they have proven to be important to Chinese people trying to understand their history. So this includes classic samizdat-style publications from the 1950s or ’60s all the way up to censored blogposts from the White Paper protests of 2022. We get the material from the authors or directors.

FN: Is the collection complete?

IJ: Absolutely not. We lack holdings on many things including China’s ethnic minorities, gender issues, and current events. A lot of the material stemmed from my initial work on ‘Sparks’ [a book Johnson wrote on alternative history inside China], so it is heavily weighted to the three big disasters of 20th century Chinese history: the Anti-Rightist Campaign/Great Famine from 1957–1961; the Cultural Revolution from 1966–1976; and the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. Those are all important events but there are many more events that Chinese people have written about, and which they are writing about today. We’re now filling in those holes, for example with material on the COVID-19 outbreak or feminism, but it’s a huge task and we rely on readers to point out important work to us, as well as our board of advisors (listed on our “about” page).

FN: In your book, “Sparks, China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future,” you refer to the notion of 江湖 (read as Jiang Hu), which has many meanings but can also refer to underground, unofficial activity, including in the field of culture and research. To what extent is this stream of alternative narratives, research, and testimonies alive under Xi Jinping’s efforts to impose his/the Party’s views on the past, present, and even future of China in all fields? 

IJ: One of the great myths about today’s China is that independent thought has been crushed. It definitely is less lively than in the 2000s, which was something like a golden age, and it is true that many platforms have been eliminated, for example with the closing of independent film festivals or the heavy censoring of Chinese social media. But it is not true that suddenly all these people disappeared from China or no longer work. They do, but they are less visible. So we see our role as making their works available. We are in contact with many of these independent thinkers. They are a great source of inspiration and knowledge about the scene inside China today.

FN: Who are your typical viewers and users of this resource? Besides researchers and academics, is this content also being used by Chinese diasporas living in Europe or elsewhere?

IJ: We’ve only had Google Analytics installed for a month, but based on that a quarter of our users are from China, a quarter from the United States, and the rest from a variety of countries around the world, primarily East Asia and Europe. Based on this and also from anecdotal information, we believe that our users are primarily Chinese or overseas Chinese communities. We’ve had strong positive feedback from overseas Chinese bookstores, podcasts, and publications, most of which are run by people recently from China or aimed at people going back and forth to the country. We think this reflects a new reality — that for the first time in roughly a century, there is a strong diasporic movement of Chinese who have the means (financial and social) to influence events back home. Our goal is to be a resource to this community of people inside and outside China, by providing the material they need to think about their country’s future.

Read the original version of this interview at the publisher’s website here.

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