https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/opinion/china-underground-historians.html

[...]

But a growing number of Chinese see this monopoly on the past as the root of their country’s authoritarian malaise. If people grow up thinking that the Chinese Communist Party is led by a group of meritocratic officials (instead of leaders appointed in backroom deals), that it rules China with a strict but fair civil service (instead of one lacking checks on its power) and defends national borders that have existed for centuries (instead of the inherited territories of a gunpowder empire), then they will have a hard time understanding why China is prone to purges, corruption and ethnic clashes. In short, if they believe that only the Chinese Communist Party can rule China, they will never question its right to rule.

This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past 20 years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films.

[...]

> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/opinion/china-underground-historians.html

....

<https://archive.is/G47I6>

| They decided to publish a journal. The students called it Spark, after
| a Chinese expression, "xinghuo liaoyuan," or "a single spark can start
| a prairie fire."

The "xinghuo liaoyuan" expression is this: 星火燎原. Chinese Russian
tutorial <https://is.gd/e0QWWk> gives it <https://archive.is/1Yss2> as an
equivalent to a Russian idiom, which was a motto of one of the very first
Lenin's socialist-revolutionary newspapers <https://tinyurl.com/22p67z7p>
I do not know whether the Chinese 星火燎原 is a loan translation or it was
originated independently, but it's not the point. The point is that since
the early 20 century the expression of this meaning was among the popular
mottoes among various pro-socialist/communist groups in the world.
One more fact the American populace aren't supposed to know is that most
of the opposition/underground groups that emerged in the early stages of
the USSR or China were not "anti-communist", but they sought to criticize
government policies from some positions of "true" or "proper" communism /
socialism. The NYT article of course slyly misses this fact.

| Around the world, history has become a battleground for the present.

The American media, education is the most malignant distorter of history.

| the great writers or filmmakers of the Cold War — people like Aleksandr
| Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera and Milos Forman .. These giants of Eastern
| Bloc intellectual life ..

As soon as Alexander Solzhenitsyn is mentioned as "giant of intellectual
life", it's appropriate to remind that he always - as in the 1970s in
the emigration as in the 1990s and later, in post-Soviet Russia - firmly
insisted that Russia and the Ukraine have no way other that to be inter-
linked closely. Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to present himself as a man
of "mixed Russian-Ukrainian descent". He stated that the border between
Russia and the Ukraine was set by the Soviet designers incorrectly.
He saw the Khrushchev's decision to append Crimea to Soviet Ukraine as a
crazy quirk. He predicted that the west-Ukrainian nationalism will turn
out highly destructive. Also, he said that the false idea of an allegedly
independent Ukraine's history since an ancient time is a myth, while the
fact is that the Ukraine is a product of Polish colonization of a part of
early Russia. And, already in the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn noted that it's
visible that the US is seeking to hostilely play the Ukraine card against
Russia through support for extremist groups within the Ukraine.