Tag: History (Academic Subject)

Book Review: ‘Sparks,’ by Ian Johnson

Media Library

SPARKS: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson By now, it is almost clichéd to compare political misrule to the dystopia that Orwell conjured through the story of the low-ranking functionary Winston Smith in “1984,” but so many aspects of the novel have come true in today’s China — from mass surveillance to fury-inciting demagogy to President Xi Jinping’s declaration that the Communist Party’s rule is “the conclusion of history” — that it may appear to preclude, as it ultimately did for Smith, the possibility…

Jonathan Mirsky, Journalist and Historian of China, Dies at 88

Chin@Strategy

Dr. Mirsky managed to dictate his article by phone. The next morning he cycled back to Tiananmen, where he saw soldiers shoot parents who were trying to enter the square to look for children who had not returned home. He said he also saw soldiers shoot doctors and nurses who had come to the scene to help the injured. (Many China scholars still regard as unresolved how many people were killed in the crackdown and where they died; estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands.) “Tiananmen Square became a…