Did you know that in China, there’s a quiet but determined group of people who, knowingly or not, record the events unfolding around them? In doing so, they’ve drawn the attention—and often the wrath—of a government determined to control how history is told.

In this episode, award-winning journalist and researcher Ian Johnson shares how he has been gathering these fragments of “unofficial history” into an online archive. He introduces us to the people behind these records—citizens, film makers, writers, and activists—and calls them what they are: underground historians.