Following Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks, with the intrepid underground journalist Jiang Xue and others he has created an important new website

• China Unofficial Archives 中國民間檔案館.

Making a valuable corrective to Party propaganda, it’s a repository of alternative sources on the history of modern China,

dedicated to making accessible the key documents, films, blogs, and publications of a movement of Chinese people seeking to reclaim their country’s history. Unlike official government or university archives, the China Unofficial Archives is open, free, and accessible to anyone from any walk of life. The site is fully bilingual in Chinese and English.

See also the initial curator’s notes.

The site is still growing, with new sources in the pipeline. The sidebar lists useful rubrics:

• Era
• Format
• Theme
• Creator.

Themes—covered by Western academics (see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, and under my Maoism tag), but whose Chinese sources are less easily accessed—include

• Land reform before and after 1949
• Covid-19
• Famine
• Farmers’ rights and rural issues
• Non-Han ethnic minority groups
• Women and feminism,

and (still in progress),

• Faith-based persecution and crackdown—including yet another moving film by Hu Jie on the tribulations of a Christian Miao community in Yunnan, Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声 (The songs of Maidichong village, 2016), subject of a separate post.

I will doubtless be posting on some topics that particularly interest me—for instance, I’m keen to get to grips with

• Examination of the Great Famine of Gansu in the 1960s (Lanzhou Literary and Historical Materials, 20th Series, 2002),

one of the rare official Chinese publications on what remains a highly sensitive subject (cf. Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture, and sequel).

Note also the Other resources menu. For updates, follow on Twitter.