Book : Sparks Chinas Underground Historians And Their Battle

-Titulo Original : Sparks Chinas Underground Historians And Their Battle For The Future

-Fabricante :

Oxford University Press

-Descripcion Original:

Using history to challenge Communist Party rule. Sparks: Chinas Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future describes how some of Chinas 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. The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communisms triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinpings signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the partys survival. But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass Chinas legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present--powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinpings strongman rule. Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinpings China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanitys great struggles of memory against forgetting a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.