Secret historians preserve China’s dark past
BEIJING — In his small ground-floor apartment just a few blocks from Beijing’s landmark Bird’s Nest stadium, Chinese language teacher, writer and do-it-yourself documentary maker Xu Xing is urgently preserving what he can of China’s forbidden past.
Travelling usually by himself all over the country, the tall 58-year-old has recorded hours of interviews with everyday Chinese who were jailed, sometimes for years, on the barest of political charges during the decadelong spasm of social chaos known as the Cultural Revolution. Xu has edited that footage into documentaries that he only shows to those he trusts, in living rooms and coffee houses, preserving for history memories kept secret for decades.
“I want it so that this never happens in China again, so this is my tireless job,” Xu said. “I tell the people I interview, ‘Clearly, I can’t bring you any money or other reward. The main thing I do is let other people know your story.’ ”
With the ruling Communist Party zealously enforcing its own version of Chinese history, Xu’s truth-telling is nothing less than an act of defiance. The government has largely succeeded in erasing or playing down whole swaths of Communist-era history by controlling what’s talked about in the country’s classrooms, museums and books, as well as in other areas of public life.
Ask the average Chinese under the age of 30 about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which scholars say claimed the lives of hundreds of pro-democracy student activists and bystanders in the heart of Beijing, and the answer will likely be ignorance or at best vague recognition. The same amnesia cloaks other dark periods of 20th-century Chinese history such as the catastrophic famines of the late 1950s, widely blamed on the government’s push to rapidly industrialize, and the Cultural Revolution, which persecuted millions from 1966 to 1976.
Fu King-Wa, a journalism and media studies professor at the University of Hong Kong, said many of his students from mainland China learned of the Tiananmen massacre for the first time through his lectures.
“This is authoritarian control of people’s access to information. They want to create a unified version of how to understand this historical issue,” Fu said.
Xu and other secret historians have taken it upon themselves to preserve photos, interview eyewitnesses and do the archival work that the Chinese government has banned most historians inside the country from doing.
You Weijie, whose husband died in the Tiananmen massacre, has conducted interviews with relatives of more than 40 other victims and stored the audio and video recordings overseas. Some are available online.
Tsering Woeser held onto dozens of her father’s old photos of the Chinese military destroying temples and persecuting Buddhist priests and officials in the far western region of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. In 2006, a Taiwan-based publisher put out a book of the photos.
Others in China run underground history magazines or preserve their memories of China’s forbidden past in paintings.
These secret historians are exposed to police surveillance and, in many cases, to near-poverty, because they have little opportunity to make a living from their work.
The Chinese government’s concerns about historical revision was spelled out in what was believed to be a confidential party document leaked to the public in 2013 and first printed in a Hong Kong newspaper.
The document called out critics who consider the Chinese Communist Party to be “a continuous series of mistakes,” and warned that “historical nihilism” rejecting the party’s version of history “is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.”
For China’s secret historians, however, documenting that history is the only way to make sure its tragedies aren’t repeated.
Woeser, a Tibetan poet, said she had wondered as a girl why her father had taken photos of the destruction in the region, especially since he had been sent there as a Chinese soldier in the 1960s to help tighten the government’s hold. Later, she said, she herself returned to track down the people captured in those photos.
“A lot of people have already died,” she said. “So I think this is a very urgent thing. Because memory is important to people, and if the person is there, the memory is there. If the person isn’t there, then the memory has disappeared.”
At different times, Woeser has been placed under house arrest for her work. You said she has also been placed under surveillance; police are permanently stationed on the ground floor of her apartment building. Xu is often stopped and questioned by local police while tracking down Cultural Revolution survivors.