Minjian historians are less elitist. They earn their own money or benefit from independent think tanks or patrons, and they write about local or specific subjects: migrant workers, victims of the Mao era, targets of religious persecution, dispossessed farmers — “the silent majority,” according to the novelist Wang Xiaobo.

These thinkers are aided by technology. Bill Clinton famously quipped that trying to control the internet was like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall,” but China, like many other countries, has controlled it to some extent. Yet technology does play a huge role in the persistence of memory. It’s through digitized movie cameras that Mr. Hu and Ms. Ai can make their documentary films at affordable prices, and through the Web that they can upload them. Those films may be blocked in China, but they are accessible to the tens of millions of Chinese thought to use VPN software to bypass government controls.

Simpler technologies are also extremely effective. Remembrance, an independent history magazine, has published widely on some of the most sensitive issues in recent Chinese history using a modern form of samizdat. Its articles are collated into a PDF and emailed to friends and supporters. They, in turn, forward the document by email or via messaging services like WeChat. Issues are archived on websites overseas, accessible to anyone in China with a VPN.

As for Tiananmen, the grass-roots historian Liao Yiwu has just published in English a book of interviews, “Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre,” that challenges how we think of those events. (I wrote the introduction.) While the protests are often portrayed as a quixotic battle by romantic students, Mr. Liao shows that it was working-class Beijingers who made the supreme sacrifice: throwing their bodies in front of the tanks to protect the students and the cause they represented.

On Friday, the Hong Kong-based New Century Press published unseen top-secret documents of a key meeting of the Chinese Communist Party that took place two weeks after the massacre. The documents show how top officials groveled before the supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, promising to support his decision to use force and to depose Zhao Ziyang , a moderate leader.

History is also written with the smallest of gestures. Every spring I make a small trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to pay respects to two victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre: Wu Xiangdong, a 21-year-old fatally shot by troops on the night of June 3-4, 1989, and his father Wu Xuehan, who died of grief six years later.

I never met them, but I knew the vivacious Xu Jue, Xiangdong’s mother and Xuehan’s wife. The police would sometimes escort her to the cemetery, sometimes try to prevent her from making the journey at all. She usually succeeded and in front of her husband’s grave would always place 27 flowers.

Four lines of the poem inscribed on the back of Xuehan’s tombstone explain, in a code of sorts, both the cause of his death and Xu Jue’s ritual:

Eight calla lilies Nine yellow chrysanthemums Six white tulips Four red roses

Eight, nine , six, four. Year, month, day. June 4, 1989.

Two years ago, Ms. Xu died of cancer, at 77. Both years since, I’ve made the trip to the graves, thinking someone ought to put out the flowers. Each time, the 27 flowers were already there, tied in a neat bundle. Someone remembered. Someone always remembers.

Ian Johnson, a Beijing-based writer, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his China coverage. His most recent book is “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.”

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