Lecture | China Seminar
Underground China
- Date
- Wednesday 12 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.31
Abstract
Newspaper headlines describe a China that is uniformly bleak: a slowing economy, tensions with the West, and a surveillance state that seems to have crushed all opposing voices. But in his new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023), Ian Johnson presents a more nuanced picture of Xi Jinping’s China, one where a vibrant movement of underground filmmakers, magazine publishers, and authors challenge the Communist Party on its most important source of legitimacy: its control of history.
Biography
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history. He is a 2024-2025 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and is founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films.
Discussants
Svetlana Kharchenkova is Assistant Professor in sociology of China at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests are at the intersection of cultural sociology, economic sociology and contemporary China. The focus is on valuation and globalization in contemporary art and book publishing markets in particular. Her current book project, funded by the Dutch Research Council, studies everyday practices and attitudes of foreign book editors in China. Her work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Poetics, European Journal of Cultural Studies and China Quarterly, among other outlets.
Bo Wang is a researcher, artist and filmmaker, currently a lecturer at LUCAS, Leiden University. He is finishing his PhD dissertation on the discourse of machine in post-socialist China at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, UvA. As an artist and filmmaker, he has exhibited widely and is a recipient of major international awards.
Chair
Ying Zhang is a historian of late medieval and early modern China (14-18th c.). Ying is mostly interested in exploring the history of Chinese political institutions, literati culture, and gender and family. Ying’s current research is focused on examining the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and society in the Ming dynasty.
