The Fat Years

“I guess it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Lao Chen.

Zhang Dou nodded.

“Take good care of Miaomiao,” said Little Xi.

The three of them hugged for a long time and said good-bye.

“I have some friends on the Yunnan border,” Lao Chen said to Little Xi, “who have never had that small-small high feeling. Shall we go and visit them?”

“If it’s no trouble,” Little Xi answered after a moment’s thought, “I’d like to bring my mother, too.”

“No trouble at all,” said Lao Chen with a smile.

The eastern sky was bright, and the two of them shaded their eyes as they walked arm in arm into the harsh light of day.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The Fat Years is a unique combination of a mystery novel with a realistic expose of the political, economic, and social system of China as it is today, and will be for the foreseeable future.

The novel posits a mystery while at the same time offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the mystery takes place. We don’t learn how the mystery came about or why until very near the end. In the meantime, there are several related questions: what happened during a spell of exactly twenty-eight days in the spring of 2011 when the government carried out one of the Chinese Communist Party’s periodic violent crackdowns? Why are most Chinese people unable to remember the violence and the economic panic of this crackdown? Or, in fact, any of the other even more violent episodes in the sixty-plus-year history of Chinese Communist Party rule?

Some of the story may initially seem to follow a familiar theme: two people suddenly meet again, some twenty years after a period when they were spending a great deal of time together, which for them was in the liberal days of the mid- to late 1980s. At that time the male protagonist, Lao Chen, had been attracted to Little Xi, but nothing ever really happened between them. When he meets her again, he is once more intrigued by her, but she doesn’t trust anyone who trusts the party-state regime. Chen’s pursuit of Little Xi leads us through both the very significant underground Christian movement and a land-rights protection campaign that demonstrates the flexibility of local Party officials.

The realistic expose, with only one or two exaggerations, reveals the Chinese Communist party-state control system, and the Chinese Communist Party’s plans to replace the United States as the most dominant superpower in the world.

The original title of the book could be literally translated as “China in the Ascendant,” and the novel is indeed primarily concerned with that subject. The main theme is that China is yet another “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” and what that may mean for the world and the Chinese people. This theme is in basic agreement with recent works of nonfiction, and also dovetails with many proposals by young ultranationalist Chinese and high officers in the Chinese armed forces who champion what can only be labeled as fascist ideas. It also reflects several recent warnings by old retired Party leaders who fear these ultranationalists and how they want China to develop.

Unlike a work of nonfiction, however edifying, The Fat Years gives you a full taste of what it feels like to be one of the characters living in the “counterfeit paradise” that is China today. In its original form it was circulated throughout China among concerned Chinese intellectuals, students, and so on, jumping the Great Firewall of censorship. Probably many high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have read it. The Chinese scholars who sent the novel to my wife, and many other Chinese intellectuals we’ve talked to, have all said that this book is “the best description of the way they live today.” I believe it is destined to become a classic in China in the Brave New World rather than the 1984 tradition. Less futuristic than Brave New World, the book is still prophetic and will long be relevant to our understanding of a modern dictatorship of the kind that exists in China today.

In the realism of the novel’s character depictions, we meet a very wide spectrum of almost all the elements of China’s three hundred to four hundred million urban population. They include ultra-nationalist wannabe fascist students, professors, and Party officials (Wei Guo, Professors X, Y, & Z); “ordinary” professors, members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who conduct “ordinary” research (Hu Yan); well-heeled real estate moguls (Jian Lin) and high-ranking officials in the party-state apparatus to whom they are firmly tied by interest and blood relationships (He Dongsheng); editors, writers, and media types (Zhuang Zizhong and unnamed Reading Journal contributors); sons and daughters of “Red Aristocrats”-longtime loyal Party families-who serve the party-state’s interests at home and around the world (Ban Cuntou, Wen Lan); young people of the lumpen proletariat, some of them escapees from slave-labor camps (Zhang Dou); other young professionals who have dropped out of the state-controlled media (Miaomiao); leaders and their followers in the rapidly growing underground Christian movement (Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun); young and old netizens who argue for and against ultranationalism and government policies; foreigners who like Lao Chen have opted to live the good life in a communist dictatorship because it is a good life for them and it does not frighten them; high-priced female escorts and drug addicts who work in places with names like the Paradise Club, catering to the newly rich, the Party powerful, and foreigners (Dong Niang and her boyfriend); youthful dissidents who protested and then escaped abroad or went silent after the Tiananmen Massacre (Shi Ping); and, finally, professional dissidents like Little Xi who refuse to accept the party-state’s version of past, present, and future reality; she is joined by the older, more experienced peripatetic cook and small-time entrepreneur Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou, the young escapee from slave labor.

A number of groups are, however, missing from The Fat Years. From the urban population, these are the many professors, lawyers, and other professionals who are actively working to change the dictatorship. Also missing are the urban working class and peasant workers (migrant laborers) who toil in the harsh working conditions of mostly foreign-owned factories (owned by American, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong Kong consortia), and who by 2010 acquired the unfortunate habit of committing suicide as a way out of their misery. Missing also are the other eight hundred to nine hundred million Chinese who live in rural China. Although, as the fictional CASS scholar Hu Yan says, their aggregate income has indeed increased in the last thirty-two years, they are certainly not enjoying the “fat years” that some, but not all, Chinese urbanites enjoy. Missing, too, except for Wei Guo’s ineffectual fascist cell, are any detailed descriptions of the special People’s Armed Police, the military, and the thugs who maintain the party-state’s stability by routinely harassing anyone who balks at having his or her house demolished, or farmland stolen as part of party-state real estate deals, or who calls for any sort of liberal democratic reforms, including genuine implementation of the existing constitution of the People’s Republic of China.

Many people interpret the China of this novel as a dystopia, but I do not believe it presents China as a dystopia. Dystopia is thought of as “an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one, the opposite of utopia.” That is an accurate description of the state presented in Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 that was modeled on Stalinist Russia. It would also describe China under Mao Zedong, especially from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, 1956 to 1976. The former occasioned the greatest man-made famine ever in world history in which some forty-five million people perished, and totally destroyed almost every aspect of China’s social, cultural, economic, and environmental infrastructure; the latter did more or less the same, except for the famine; fatalities in the Cultural Revolution were usually the result of intellectuals and teachers being beaten to death by young Red Guards, suicide, murder, or civil warfare.

China today and for the foreseeable future is not a dystopia, nor is it a utopia; it’s not even trying to be a utopia. It is a Leviathan-like Leninist party-state that is, by the Chinese Communist Party’s standards, a great success, a putatively “harmonious society” that aims to give everyone a “moderately decent standard of living.” Some people call it a fascist state, but if it is, it is a truly successful fascist state. A fascist state, however, has to have an ardent ideology and a Great Leader, but China today has neither. The semifascist ultranationalists, like Wei Guo in the novel, are a minority, and their passion does not extend to the nine men of the Politburo Standing