Truth will out

Compelling stories of those who are determined to defy the Communist Party line to expose tyranny and suffering.

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Ian Johnson's The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao, released in 2017, is often cited as one of the best books on modern China. Johnson found a yearning for spiritual belief in a China run by the Communist Party. His new book, Sparks, is just as good. Like Souls, it approaches modern China at an oblique angle, investigating what at first seems insubstantial but by the end feels a significant moral challenge to the party.

Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer, tells the stories of people who feel compelled to record a truth in opposition to the official one.

They put the stories on YouTube videos, in scrapbooks and makeshift magazines, similar to what were known as the Eastern Bloc samizdat of the Cold War.

Sparks, which gives the book its name, was one such magazine. It was published by a group of young people exiled after raising concerns during Mao's brief phase allowing criticism during the doomed "Let one hundred flowers bloom" campaign. They later produced the magazine from a tractor shed trying to warn people about the Great Famine in the late 1950s. It ended badly they were hunted, imprisoned and executed.