Ian Johnson discusses at the Council on Foreign Relations his new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, which describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.Read More →
In his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, the Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes a movement of underground historians, trying to safeguard the country’s history from eradication by the communist party, in a discussion at Politico.Read More →
China veteran Ian Johnson published earlier this month China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, “Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping’s China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity’s great struggles of memory against forgetting―a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.” Read More →
China’s rules are building a divide with the rest of the world, similar to the Berlin wall Russia started to build last century, says China veteran Ian Johnson in news.com.au. “Speech is more restricted than ever. Community activities and social groups are strictly regulated and monitored by the authorities,” he explained.Read More →
Former China correspondent and author Ian Johnson was forced to leave the country in 2020 and revisited China earlier in 2023 for Foreign Affairs. He found a country in stagnation, that was used to double-digit growth, but lost its economic glamor, the former power base of the Communist Party. Strict government regulations changed China he knew. Also, information on his latest book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. Read More →
China veteran and scholar Ian Johnson will publish in September 2023 his next book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. “It describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history,” writes Ian Johnson at his weblog.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia is shocked by the fake news in China’s media on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she reports while traveling in Northern Africa. “The first casualty of war is truth.” How true!”, she writes on her weblog.Read More →
China veteran Shaun Rein explains why the West does so poorly in understanding China, and why China’s government is doing such a bad job in explaining China to the rest of the world, in an interview with Cyrus Janssen.Read More →
How will people remember the Wuhan lockdown, two years ago at the start of the global coronavirus crisis, asks CFR-scholar Ian Johnson in a debate at the NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge on the book “The Wuhan Lockdown”, by Yang Guobin. How successful has the state been in suppressing the knowledge of this hiccup in communist rule in Wuhan, Ian Johnson asks the author.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia talks about the importance of learning English, for herself and for the country, as anti-Western attitudes in China make it today less important for students to dive into learning English and other languages, she tells at the weblog of the China Institute.Read More →
China under President Xi Jinping is profoundly changing its attitude to the outside world, much more than a pandemic-driven closure of the borders, says political analyst Victor Shih to CNN.Read More →
Giant demographic changes in Africa have defined most of China’s strategic vision, says Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, at a discussion at the National Bureau of Asian Research on the report by Nadège Rolland“A New Great Game? Situating Africa in China’s Strategic Thinking.”Read More →