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About the talk:
Join the Long US-China Institute to hear journalist Ian Johnson discuss his most recent book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. Sparks 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. 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.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event. 

About the speaker: 
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson 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 senior fellow for Chinese studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, contributes to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and regularly speaks in the media or to public audiences about China.