This is the first of what we anticipate will be a semi-regular feature of the China Unofficial Archive—a note from some of the site’s curators explaining different aspects of the archive. This first note will focus on our launch today, December 13, 2023, helping you understand our aims and our goals for the future. 

First, an introduction. My name is Ian Johnson, a former journalist and currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. (You can read more about me on my homepage, [here](https://ian-johnson.com/about-me/).) I came up with the idea for the China Unofficial Archives when I was writing my book [Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sparks-9780197575505?cc=us&lang=en&). One of the book’s premises is that over the past quarter century it has become easier for Chinese people to write or film independent accounts of their country’s history, and to access books, films, and magazines, many of them banned by the government. I called these works “underground” histories, but another term could have been “unofficial” or “citizen” histories that are different from the official narrative promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. 

Despite this explosion of unofficial histories, many people inside China told me that these works could use a proper home. Although people can relatively easily share PDFs or digital films, some of this sharing is ad hoc—you get one book but don’t realize that other people have also published or made films on the same topic. In addition, it can still require much time to find these items online. There are some sites that offer some of this material, but many of them are marred by invasive advertising, and political commentary. None of them introduce the material and explain, in a neutral but authoritative way, why they matter. They also do not tag the material by creator, topic, era, or format, allowing users to explain other related material in a systematic way. So I began to see that there was a need for an independent, reliable, non-partisan home for this material that could be accessed (with a VPN) inside China.

In addition, even though most of this material is in Chinese, I thought that even for people who can’t read Chinese it would be useful to see the sheer scope and ambition of China’s citizen historians. Many people outside China believe that independent thought inside the country has been crushed. This archive shows that this is not the case. 

We began putting this site together in June after we received news that we would get a grant from a foundation that supports free speech. I work on this site in my spare time, but we needed to hire a web designer and other people to help input the material. The grant allowed us to begin to do that. We also got pro bono legal counsel to help us register as a non-profit charity in the United States. And we partnered with The [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/), which has helped us digitalize public-domain books and films.

Over the past few months, our team has put in a huge amount of work, but we are far from finished; on the contrary, you should view today’s launch as a soft opening. We have 850 items in the collection, but sharp-eyed observers will note that about half of them are individual issues of two magazines, Remembrance (记忆) and China Through the Ages (炎黄春秋). Compared to the vast output of China’s citizen historians over the past decades, our offering needs to expand many times over. 

Our priorities for 2024, include:

* Uploading 175 new films, which will radically expand the films we have on offer.
* In partnership with the Internet Archive using AI to generate English subtitles for some of the films that do not have subtitles.
* Indexing Remembrance and China Through the Ages so that users can search the magazines for specific articles.
* Uploading two other important alternative history magazines, Yesterday (昨天) and Small Scars of the Past (往事微痕), and making them searchable. 
* Testing the feasibility of auto-translating material to give English-language readers a chance to savor key works.
* Attending the [Association of Asian Studies annual meeting](https://www.asianstudies.org/conference/) in Seattle on March 15-17. We will present the archive and host a panel discussion. 

We want to keep these posts short, so I’ll sign off. In the future, other members of our staff or advisory board will contribute notes on issues related to selecting, translating, and organizing the archive, or introducing a text that is especially important. In the meantime, enjoy the site and please send constructive feedback to [minjiandanganguan@gmail.com](mailto:minjiandanganguan@gmail.com) 

Ian Johnson

Welcome to our archive