About China Unofficial Archives

China Unofficial Archives

The China Unofficial Archives (民间档案馆, Minjian Danganguan; also rendered the China Unofficial Archive) is a bilingual English and Simplified Chinese online non-profit archive devoted to unofficial citizen histories of modern China. Officially launched on 13 December 2023, it was founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former China correspondent Ian Johnson and co-created and co-maintained by Chinese journalist Jiang Xue and other contributors, some of whom remain anonymous. Billed as the first independent archive of unofficial citizen histories, it collects, preserves and disseminates censored and suppressed Chinese folk history — samizdat magazines, books, films, blogs and publications spanning the period since the Communists took power in 1949. It is an online archive project and should not be confused with print publications of similar name.

Launch at the University of Westminster

The archive was officially launched on 13 December 2023 at an online event hosted by the Contemporary China Centre of the University of Westminster, chaired by Gerda Wielander. The launch panel featured Ian Johnson and Shao Jiang, author of Citizen Publications in China Before the Internet, discussing the new archive and the tradition of unofficial publishing it preserves. Ohio State University's MCLC Resource Center publicised the launch, describing the archive as a significant and unique new online resource. The academic setting of the launch reflected the project's intended audience: Johnson conceived the site as a clearing house for historical research material for people who lack access to large research libraries at major universities such as Harvard.

Roots in the book Sparks

The archive grew directly out of Johnson's 2023 book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, published by Oxford University Press on 26 September 2023. Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks portrays a nationwide network of independent writers, artists, filmmakers, amateur historians, novelists and memoirists who use digital technologies to bypass censorship and surveillance and document events the state would rather forget — from famines and purges of the past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. The book's title comes from Spark, a secretly mimeographed magazine begun in 1960 that lasted only two issues, some of whose contributors were executed as counter-revolutionaries after years in prison. The archive was created to serve the same community the book describes: the "underground historians" producing China's unofficial record, and the readers seeking it.

What the archive holds

The archive launched with over 860 curated and introduced items, and its founders planned to grow the collection roughly ten-fold. Its holdings include books, films and documentary records from key points in China's recent history: material on the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Famine of the late 1950s to early 1960s, memoirs of the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, former Beijing mayor Chen Xitong's personal account of 1989, and material extending to the White Paper Movement. The launch publicity summarised the scope plainly: the archive spans 75 years of samizdat magazines, books and movies, reaching from the first years of the People's Republic of China to the present. Individual catalogue entries illustrate the range: the site presents works such as French sinologist Michel Bonnin's study of the "sent-down youth" of the 1968–1980 Down to the Countryside Movement, and memoirs of the educated youth and the Production and Construction Corps. At launch, the archive also held a digitisation backlog of around 175 films still being prepared for the site.

An open, bilingual and non-profit model

The archive describes itself as 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, it is open, free and accessible to anyone from any walk of life, and the site is fully bilingual in Chinese and English, which it calls the international language of scholarship. It is a non-profit project. Johnson has been careful to note that he does not endorse any of the material on the site as better or more truthful than any other material: the archive's function is preservation and access, presenting curated items with introductions rather than adjudicating between accounts. That stance distinguishes it from an official archive, whose holdings reflect a sanctioned narrative.

The people behind it

Founder Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former China correspondent whose grassroots research in China spans decades; reviewers of Sparks described him as one of the most experienced Western journalists writing about China. The archive was co-created and is co-maintained by Chinese journalist Jiang Xue and others who prefer to remain anonymous — a partly anonymous team of journalists and historians, as Radio Free Asia described it. Anonymity is a practical necessity for contributors handling material that is censored or suppressed inside China. Johnson told Radio Free Asia that he hoped more Chinese people would gain access through the archive to materials unavailable in China because of government censorship.

Access and the Great Firewall

The archive is aimed primarily at people living under censorship: Johnson estimated that around 75 to 80 percent of its focus is on people still living under censorship, with the remainder aimed at non-Chinese readers overseas. Yet the site is unlikely to be accessible to internet users behind the Great Firewall of government censorship in China unless they use special tools to circumvent government blocks and filters. That paradox — an archive built for readers inside China that those readers can reach only indirectly — is inherent to unofficial-history work, and it is one reason the project maintains outreach channels beyond its website, including, from early 2025, e-newsletters and social media activity to circulate its holdings and announcements.

Publishing beyond the website

The archive's work extends into print. It published a first physical book of Jiabiangou labour-camp survivor memoirs arising from the Spark case — returning to the story of the mimeographed magazine whose contributors were persecuted, and of the labour camp in Gansu where many of those caught up in the Anti-Rightist campaigns were sent. A physical book serves readers and libraries that a website cannot reach and gives the preserved testimony a durable form independent of any single platform. The combination of a growing digital catalogue, a digitisation programme for its film backlog, newsletters and print publishing reflects an archival strategy aimed at redundancy: material that survives in several forms and places is harder to erase.

Reception and coverage

The archive's launch and work have been covered by Radio Free Asia, whose report on the "uncensored history of modern China" introduced the project to a wide audience, and by Ohio State University's MCLC Resource Center, a leading resource for modern Chinese literature and culture studies. Johnson discussed the underground historians and the forthcoming archive on The Spectator's Chinese Whispers podcast, and the Cato Institute's blog highlighted Sparks and the archive's subject matter in its coverage of China's unofficial historians. For scholars of modern China, the archive offers a single, freely accessible point of entry to samizdat and citizen-history material that previously circulated informally, in photocopies, private collections and word of mouth — material whose survival was never guaranteed.

Official website

The China Unofficial Archives is at minjian-danganguan.org. The bilingual site presents its catalogue of books, films, blogs and publications with introductions, and states its mission of making unofficial citizen histories of China since 1949 accessible to anyone.