liberalization. In China 2011, as in The Fat Years, much of the urban population seems to have tacitly agreed to forget past political violence, and to concentrate on enjoying the fat times of the here-and- now. Not only sharp businessmen, but also many of China’s writers and thinkers have benefited, enjoying generous research grants, conference budgets, and travel opportunities, as long as they do not break taboos on open discussion of issues such as official abuse of power, the need for political reforms, human rights abuses against critics of the regime, ethnic tensions (especially in Xinjiang or Tibet), and widespread censorship. This unspoken consensus also demands public amnesia about communist-manufactured cataclysms: in particular, the man-made disasters of the Maoist era (the brutal excesses of Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution) and, of course, the bloodletting of 1989. “Many of those who were once critical of the regime are now part of the system,” Chan Koonchung has observed. “The Party has absorbed the elites by handing out funding, positions, and employment. Those in universities are getting government projects so they don’t want to be vocal. Many people depend on money from the state to build their careers. So the intellectual center is mainly employed by the state, which is now rich enough to attract it with apparently limitless funding. More and more people are buying into this now. It’s very difficult to find people to make a challenge” while critics of the government are becoming “increasingly marginalized.”
Although communist control might be far less visible in contemporary China than it was during, say, the Maoist era, it is quietly ubiquitous: through public and private businesses, local politics, media, and culture. The Party, Chan Koonchung points out, is “the elephant in the room of contemporary China-no one discusses it but it’s always there. The country’s like a Rubix cube-enormously complex, but with one organizing principle: the Communist Party.” When I met him in Beijing in the summer of 2010, he invited me to lunch at a fashionable East-West fusion restaurant in Sanlitun, one of the city’s best-heeled commercial quarters, littered with high-end bars, cafes, and designer stores, through which The Fat Years’ own hero, Chen, regularly strolls feeling “incomparably blessed.” After a smiling, smart-casual young Chinese waiter introduced himself to us in English (“Hi, I’m Darren, I’ll be looking after you today”) then disappeared again, Chan Koonchung conspiratorially reminded me: “There’ll be Party members in this joint venture too, keeping an eye on things.”
Much of the force of The Fat Years, then, springs from its unusual honesty about certain aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. For Chen is almost unique, among his mainland-Chinese novelist contemporaries, in confronting the political no-go zones of life in China today. By 2000, according to many critics, Chinese writers could write about anything they wanted without fear of severe reprisal, and even with the prospect of financial gain-if they did not write directly about politics. What has resulted is a culture often rich in commercial shock value-in its explicit descriptions of sex and violence-but frustratingly weak in its grasp of the political roots of China’s problems. China’s leadership remains a taboo subject-on the Chinese Internet, even writing the names of China’s rulers is prohibited. Acclaimed mainland novelists such as Yu Hua write bestselling books about communist China that evoke the chaos of war and revolution, but that pull their punches when it comes to seeking the deep, institutional causes of post-1949 China’s ills, and that avoid-for censorship reasons-even the most veiled reference to the suppression of the 1989 protests. The violence of the Cultural Revolution, for example, is portrayed as an irrational explosion of thuggery, without any attempt to search for longer-term origins (in, say, communism’s normalization of violence and in mass resentment of its castelike system of class designations). The Fat Years, by contrast, directly faces up to the marriage of mass acquiescence and violent political intimidation that keeps China’s authoritarian show on the road. One contemporary writer did not wholly identify with Chan Koonchung’s vision of China’s near future, but admitted that “at least he’s willing to point out some of the holes in our fancy tapestry. He’s the only Sinophone author to make the attempt, unfortunately. And it’s we mainland-Chinese writers who are to blame for that.”
The mainland-Chinese response to Chan’s novel was revealing. With its explicit references to the 1989 crackdown and to Party censorship, the book-published in Hong Kong-was of course not officially distributed on the mainland. But the Communist Party’s control on information-although extensive-is nowhere near as absolute as portrayed in The Fat Years, and the book was sold under-the-counter in some Beijing bookstores, or by mail order from Hong Kong; each copy that reached the mainland, one estimate ran, was passed between at least six or seven readers. Its mainland audience was seriously shaken by the novel’s “authenticity” (kaopu); by its discussion of how the government has silenced or absorbed its opponents; by its descriptions of collective amnesia and compromise with the regime, and of the fascism implicit in China’s brave new world. “It’s a long time since I read anything that made me think so much,” wrote a reader. “I almost forgot that it was science fiction,” admitted another. “It’s more like a documentary.” “Now we know what China’s near future will be like,” observed one blogger, while chic party hostesses slipped copies of the book into guests’ take-home bags. “Starting from today,” decided one journalist after finishing the novel, “I have no friends and I have no enemies. I now divide people into two categories-those who have read The Fat Years and those who haven’t.” “The book is hot,” a publisher anonymously declared, noting the resonances between Chen’s fictional diagnosis of China’s political landscape and recent headline controversies such as the eleven-year sentence handed down to Liu Xiaobo in 2009 after his calls for constitutional human rights, or Google’s 2010 confrontation with government censorship. “It’s very clear that things are getting harsher and harsher.” Others again read it as utopia, rather than dystopia. “If only China could be just like this!” sighed another blogger. “It would be wonderful.” Chan reported that officials at the very pinnacle of China’s political hierarchy had told him that “the political situation in the novel summarized their basic difficulties and plan… And ordinary readers seemed quite happy that a former radical from the 1980s like Little Xi was marginalized as she was-they thought that was fine. Many mainland readers felt that cracking down with martial law was fine, too-that it was an appropriate response to civil chaos.”
But The Fat Years’ power to unsettle goes beyond its uncomfortable proximity to reality. It sketches a credible likeness of China, then pushes it a touch beyond credibility. Chan’s China is self- satisfied to an uncanny degree. “Now everybody’s saying there’s no country in the world as good as China,” Chan’s hero remarks early in the book, noting “so many celebrated members of the intellectual elite… harmoniously gathered together in one place looking genuinely happy, even euphoric… This really must be a true age of peace and prosperity… Every day I read the papers, surfed the net, and watched the TV news, and every day I congratulated myself on living in China; sometimes I was moved to tears I felt so blessed.” The puzzle of Chan’s blissed-out China is unraveled only at the end of the book. This fictional China is also intellectually repressive and conformist way beyond contemporary standards. Although for well over a decade, for example, the Chinese government has been one of the world’s most assiduous censors of the web, in reality the Chinese Internet still seethes with potential dissent and capacity to organize against the regime, with a lawyer like Teng Biao only one representative of China’s awkward squad. At one point in the novel, Chen tries to find a restrained satire of intellectual life under Maoism, Yang Jiang’s Baptism, which is at present easily found in Beijing; the assistant in the bookshop tells him that not only is it not available in that bookshop, but that officially it does not exist-all digital record of the book has disappeared. Chan’s fictional regime has, moreover, apparently erased from mass memory a whole, brutal month of government violence and civil war from just two years earlier. (Although public discussion of the bloodletting of 1989 is impossible in contemporary China, it assuredly lives on in private memory.) Chan Koonchung’s dystopian China of 2013 represents a degraded version of a recognizable state: the iron fist of a harsh, Leninist dictatorship lying inside the utopian velvet glove of communism. To one mainland blogger, the novel seemed both “extremely realistic” and an allegory of “everyone’s common fate. [It] painfully describes the fears that lie deep in our hearts, [convincing us] that the world described in the book is quickly bearing down on us.”
Although the autocracy of The Fat Years is less shockingly brutal than Orwell’s Ingsoc in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the restrained plausibility of Chan’s dystopia brings with it a clear warning about China’s possible near future. Nearing the end of his torture by O’Brien, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith asks his captor why the Party seeks power, expecting some self-loving sentiment about dictatorship being for “the good of the people.” His persecutor has no such illusions: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power… The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” He Dongsheng, the representative of the communist leadership in The Fat Years who finally reveals the government’s grand scheme “for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World,” is an altogether softer dictator, whose policies-like those of China’s government today-rely more heavily on the active agreement of his Chinese subjects. The China that he has created, he believes, is “the best option in the real world”: “there is no
