In the Chinese Communist Party's world, history is a war zone to be dominated. As events move further into the past, they become increasingly contentious. Go back fifty years, and CCP's religious violence is reassigned to World War II Japanese. Go back seventy years, events such as Chinese land reforms are so contentious so as to be entirely taboo.

China is the world's preeminent monolith. How can anyone hope that history hasn't ended, carved in stone? As Ian Johnson meticulously documents, there are millions of "wild historians" across China, which, despite the CCP rhetoric, continues to be a diverse, storied, and stalwart.

The books title was inspired by "Spark," a briefly-circulated underground magazine published in China in the 1960s.

This book does depict the gore, cannibalism, and horror of the Cultural Revolution and other eras of China's history. If this sort of things disturbs you, you may need to skip over these parts.

I think that Adam Curtis' "Hypernormalisation" concept is the best way of understanding what is playing out in China right now. When reality becomes too complex to control, autocratic regimes begin to contract the Overton Window until it is small enough for them to control. This is the CCP's agenda as it relates to history.

The reader might ask, "but don't all empires rewrite history?" Well, yes, and of course the United States has done this as well. And yet it is especially illuminating in the case of the CCP, as it is possibly the most extreme case ever witnessed (which is ominous, given the direction of Freedom of the Press in most of the world right now, US included).

Reading this book has contributed to my evolving understanding of the importance of history. I would currently express it thus: history is the discipline of excavating the moments when exterior forces become interior dynamics. Everything that has ever happened has left its mark on the substrate of the present moment, but if you want to expand the present back out to eternity, these artifacts become infinitely subtle.

At the end of the book, Johnson offers an extensive set of books, films, and references to other materials. I can't wait to explore further. ( )