Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent most of his adult life in China, working as a correspondent for The New York Times, New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of other books that also focus on the intersection of politics and civil society, including The Souls of China- The Return of Religion After Mao, and Wild Grass- Three Stories of Change in Modern China.
Ian Johnson is one of the most experienced and thoughtful Western
journalists writing about China. Now he has turned his attention to
one of the most important battles in contemporary China: the
struggle to control history ... Moving and full of human character
and detail. It's a compelling read, beautifully written, and the
product of deep research carried out in China over many years ...
an exemplary tribute.
*Literary Review*
Sparks is a work of scholarship, investigative journalism of a kind
that rarely happens in the age of slashed budgets, with eyewitness
accounts of brutality that will chill your blood ... Johnson’s
stories bring these numbers, and this history, chillingly
alive.
*Sunday Times*
A skilful exploration… Johnson’s skill lies in demonstrating the
philosophical links between China’s geography and its political and
cultural landscape ... It is deeply satisfying to read a book about
China that could only have been written after decades of serious
engagement with the country.
*The Guardian*
A striking account ... This immersive survey combines interviews,
firsthand reportage, and historical research to paint a moving
group portrait of China’s political dissidents.
*Publishers Weekly*
Mr Johnson’s ability to evade controls and gain the trust of his
subjects is evident in his compellingly written work. The result is
a rare insight into the extraordinary risks that some Chinese take
to illuminate the darkest corners of communism.
*The Economist*
An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read, Sparks is alive
with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably,
refuse to let their histories be forgotten. It's a privilege to
read books like these.
*Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers*
A revelation: this historian from overseas spent years penetrating
the world of underground Chinese historians, becoming in his own
right a recorder of pioneers such as Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Jiang
Xue, who use text and video to record China's lost history.
*Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker, God is Red and For a Song
and a Hundred Songs*
This compelling and highly enjoyable book will greatly enhance the
general reader's understanding of the subtle counter-currents of
resistance at work in Chinese society below the smooth surface of
control and compliance.
*Sebastian Veg, author of Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots
Intellectuals*
A powerful narrative of how the human spirit has survived the cruel
repression of Maoist totalitarianism and is still doing the same
against Xi Jinping's determined efforts to impose a new form of
digital totalitarianism ... A must read for anyone interested in
the Chinese and China.
*Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of
Oriental and African Studies*
Ian Johnson has conducted some of the most important grassroots
research of any foreign journalist in China. With Sparks, he turns
his attention to history - not the sanctioned, censored, and
selective history promoted by the Communist Party, but the
independent histories that are being written and filmed by brave
individuals across the country. This book is a powerful reminder of
the ways in which China's future depends on who controls the
past.
*Peter Hessler*
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