“We know that they're lying; they know that we know they're lying; we also know that they know that we know they're lying; but they still lie.” This famous quote, attributed to Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, went viral on Chinese social media in February 2020 upon the tragic death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the COVID-19 whistleblower. It exemplifies perfectly what Margaret Hillenbrand describes as “public secrecy” in Negative Exposures. Yet in this book, Hillenbrand engages with a variation of this quote, replacing the final phrase with “but we pretend to believe them.” Instead of focusing on an antagonistic attitude toward the government, Hillenbrand explores public secrecy as a mode of governmentality and a structuring force of society in China, relying on complicity to function in a society that is a cryptocracy.

Challenging the popular discourses of censorship and amnesia applied to such events as the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hillenbrand theorizes public secrecy in the domain of the visual that can be defined as a “visual regime of spectrality.” She contends that neither the discourse of censorship nor that of amnesia accounts for the agency of the public who have experienced the events, thus overlooking the realm of the “unforgettable yet unsayable.” Public secrecy, on the contrary, is a more productive framework to look at China's troubled past and textured reality.

However, unlike commonly used metaphors such as “the elephant in the room” or “the naked emperor,” the ones that Hillenbrand regularly refers to in the book, public secrecy in China, for her, exhibits a ghostly characteristic that is more elusive and harder to pinpoint. She finds the spectrality of public secrecy in what she defines as “photo-forms,” artistic works repurposed from historical photographs. Given its indexicality and indeterminacy, the photo-form has the capacity to create a field of vision that at once reveals and conceals, one that contains encryption and requires decipherment.

One of the great contributions of the book is its intricate navigation across different disciplines and fields in terms of public secrecy. Hillenbrand's masterful investigation marshals critical theories and transmedial analysis in secrecy studies, visual studies, and trauma studies, as well as Chinese art and social media studies. The book consists of four chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The four chapters examine photo-forms derived from old photographs taken during the Nanjing Massacre, family photos mobilized or refashioned after the Cultural Revolution, a photo of the murdered principal of a girls’ middle school, Bian Zhongyun, enshrined by her husband, together with “Red Princess” Song Binbin's apology, and the iconic image of Tank Man's face-off with the tanks during the Tiananmen incident of 1989. Hillenbrand tackles the spectrality of these images in multiple transmedial renditions, to show how what is a public secret contains a mechanism of knowledge, and how the government attempts to appropriate public secrecy to its propagandist advantage, as most explicitly manifested in the controversies of the Nanjing Massacre and Tank Man.

Filled with self-reflexive arguments, sophisticated analyses, and elegant prose, this engaging study is destined to be an important work to look at Chinese society as a cryptocracy and its syntax of power. Anyone interested in Chinese culture and politics will benefit from its fresh perspective, although informed readers will find it more accessible. However, just as it creates, at times, an elusive language by employing interchangeable metaphors for secrecy, there are moments when this book conjures up its own wraiths as much as it informs readers. It will inspire more discussions of related issues, such as the notions of “cryptocracy,” “cryptopolitics,” and “cryptosphere,” and the degree to which they distinguish China from other countries, especially when rampant conspiracy theories have gained currency in social media in the West. It also prompts one to ask whether today's China is different from that of the Maoist era in terms of its social functioning, and whether time plays a role in the practice of public secrecy.

Just as Hillenbrand relates, the reluctance to speak also suggests epistemological indeterminacy, and the photo-form exhibits a processual and artifactual quality. What, then, is the relationship between time and subjectivity in people's ambivalent complicity, if it is not entirely due to censorship? The spectrality revealed in the photo-forms thus opens up a new space of unknowability which, rather than manifesting an antagonistic agency of the artists or experiencers, shows the submission of agency to time, to the future when the classified documents are released or more information becomes available. This ambivalent self-silencing or calculated revelation thus speaks to a broader context of Chinese politics versus temporality in the practice of public secrecy.