On 7 February of this year, within hours of the second and final reported death of Dr Li Wenliang, Weibo was awash with public expressions of grief, indignation and sorrow at the whistleblower's passing from the disease for which he had attempted to sound the alarm. Notwithstanding the assiduous efforts of an army of official censors to stem the rising tide of unauthorized commemorations, tens of thousands of spontaneous eulogies surged through Chinese cyberspace, many accompanied by starkly repurposed images of Dr Li in his hospital bed, rendered in black and white, some beside eternally flickering digital candles. Artists who had never met Dr Li posted portraits drawn freehand from the photos he had posted of himself online shortly before his untimely death. The most haunting of these was created by the Australia-based political cartoonist, Badiucao, whose portrait of Dr Li faithfully reproduced his likeness, complete with a surgical mask over which the artist drew an open mouth, eerily frozen in a soundless scream, silenced now in perpetuity.

Margaret Hillenbrand's incisive and beautifully composed monograph takes precisely these sorts of “photo-forms” – repurposed historical photographs – and their circulation as the point of departure for her fascinating excursus of public secrecy in contemporary China. While recognizing the CCP regime as fundamentally cryptocratic, Hillenbrand is not chiefly focused on documenting the finely-honed techniques of censorship in China today, arguing that “such a top-down view is missing a dimension,” insofar as “the disavowal of history in China has many stakeholders, whether willing or otherwise, affiliated with the state or not”; instead, she emphasizes that “the hushing of history is a densely collective endeavor in China. The silences of the present are conspiratorial” (p. 2). Public secrecy persists in part because it serves deep unmet needs; participation in the hidden economy of shared secrets itself generates ways of belonging, a collective sense of “knowing what not to know” that is both reinforced by consensual silences and incited in the selective repurposing of iconic images.

So begins Hillenbrand's fascinating discussion of the “ex-secret” of the Nanjing Massacre, which remained largely unspeakable throughout the Mao era, but was rediscovered in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and their brutal denouement. In its rediscovery, Hillenbrand observes, “we might argue that the party-state substituted the forbidden image of the Tank Man braving annihilation by People's Liberation Army tanks with the now infamous photograph of a man beneath a tree awaiting execution by Japanese swordsmen” (p. 49). The photo-forms behind the Massacre's revival were quickly distilled into a core cannon of images repurposed for use in history textbooks circulated as part of the patriotic education campaign, propaganda posters marking China's deepening engagement with “national humiliation,” and a host of commemorative spaces, both on- and off-line.

Hillenbrand then shifts her gaze from the outing of atrocities committed by an invading army to what she dubs the “vernacular” public secrets of the Cultural Revolution, in which “what was hushed up were those experiences of countless ordinary people that contradicted the state narrative” (p. 98). One chapter explores the collusive silences of the period through the genre of sharing family photographs: Liu Xinwu's My Family Photograph Album (Siren zhaoxiangbu), originally published in 1988, blazed a trail that was expanded upon ten years later by the pictorial Old Photographs (Lao zhaopian), one of the most commercially successful serials in post-Cultural Revolution China. The “repetitive thematic nodal points that string the network of family photo-texts together” in this new public practice of “scar-sharing” turned on the themes of “missing persons” and “then and now” contrasts that were both spectral and secretive, gesturing at a Mao-era “politics as extreme attrition” without explicitly naming it as such (pp. 112, 114). Hillenbrand then turns to the Cultural Revolution tragedy of one family in particular, that of Bian Zhongyun, former vice-principal of the Girls Middle School attached to Beijing Normal University. Bian was tortured and murdered by as yet unnamed Red Guards during the infamous “blood red” August of 1966, as was captured in Hu Jie's arresting “Though I Am Gone” (Wo sui si qu). Told largely through the eyes and frequently faltering voice of her surviving partner, Wang Jingyao, the documentary (banned the year it was released in the PRC) serves to underscore the spectral nature of the photo-forms on which Hillenbrand has trained her vision, by succeeding in “drawing spectators into an interrogation of what it means to live with and among ghosts” (p. 155). Images of Bian are interspersed with photo-forms of Song Binbin, the student leader from the school whose gifting of a Red Guard armband to Mao atop Tiananmen remains one of the enduring iconic images of the early Cultural Revolution period.

Hillenbrand concludes her study by returning once again to the iconic photo-form of the Tank Man and its many permutations, from the near-sublime to the ridiculous, hidden in plain sight. Hillebrand concludes that the myriad repurposings of his image, “in part because of their fugitive character, perform a key role within the context of ongoing state suppression of the June 4 protests as memory.” The events of June 1989, she asserts, highlight the “deep intergenerational crevasse” that has emerged “between those who know what not to know, and those who know next to nothing” (p. 174). Her work could not have come at a more opportune time, reminding us that “[in] places where public secrecy reigns, photo-forms and the communing they enjoin can form a fleeting parallax world: an alternative space in which public secrecy can be named and even owned, and in ways that bind spectators both to the artwork and to each other” (p. 5).