The Fat Years

Committee who actually govern China-Party Central, represented in the novel by one of its secretaries, He Dongsheng.

China is a party-state in which the Communist Party is both the state and the government and controls every institution in the society. Since 1979, the Chinese Communist Party has achieved tremendous economic successes by abandoning any residual socialist or communist ideals, and by becoming the director of a capitalist economy without the rule of law, a capitalist society claiming to be a dictatorship of the proletariat that rules for the people and in their interests. With the Communist Party at the center of everything, this modern Leviathan works by attracting direct foreign investment, selling to foreign consumers, and buying off most of the professional urban class, and many of the peasants, while brutally suppressing any dissent and treating the entire population as a “reserve army” that labors for the benefit of the Communist Party and its party-state apparatus.

The Party leaders have no dream of utopia, only a dream of amassing more wealth and power for themselves and their dependents while suppressing all malcontents in the name of national stability. In this, they still resemble O’Brien’s Party mentioned in Professor Lovell’s Preface. In a recent interview, CASS professor Yu Jianrong, an outspoken advocate of individual rights, makes an interesting comparison between the “stability” of Taiwan and that of China. His comments on the two different kinds of “stability” are that, in his view, “when judging stability in Taiwan the criterion” is “whether or not the situation will influence the stability of the law,” while the standard for judging stability on the mainland is mainly “whether or not the situation will influence the stability of the Chinese Communist Party regime… In order to consolidate its regime, the Chinese Communist Party views every action that might remove their pressure on the people to be a destabilizing element… In order to eliminate all the destabilizing elements, the Chinese Communist Party then continuously practices suppression, i.e., takes suppression for stability… I believe that the core belief of the Chinese Communist Party is not economic development. There is only one goal of everything it does: the exclusiveness of its political power. Without realizing this, one cannot really understand the Chinese Communist Party… It has long since become a party without belief, a party of pragmatism. The only thing that will influence it is the pressure of reality.”

The only vision the Chinese Communist Party has is the overall vision of coming world hegemony, related in The Fat Years through He Dongsheng’s lengthy monologue. Some readers may regard this as a tedious “soap box monologue” lacking in drama, but they would be mistaken. Most liberal ethnic-Chinese scholars living in China and abroad regard the last section of the work as very dramatic and the most important part of the book. Important both in He Dongsheng’s manner of delivery, and in the content of his monologue.

The way He Dongsheng talks to, or rather lectures at, his kidnappers is exactly the way the Party leadership talks to the 1.3 billion Chinese. It is how “President” Hu Jintao addresses the ordinary people, while Premier Wen Jiabao seems to have tried to imitate the so-called populism of Mao’s behind-the-scenes hatchet man Zhou Enlai (a performance that has been criticized by the dissident Yu Jie, in a book published this year in Hong Kong). Several Chinese intellectuals and reporters from the popular liberal paper Southern Weekly (itself mentioned in the novel) who visited Taiwan in November 2010 witnessed the way President Ma Ying-jeou interacted with the ordinary people and with other officials. Then they publicly lamented the fact that no dialogue of that sort could possibly take place in the People’s Republic.

Reality has already caught up with He Dongsheng’s monologue, and many of the plans he describes have already been fulfilled, especially China’s buying up of much of the world’s natural resources to fuel its economic behemoth. Everything else, except for the genuine fantasy of an alliance with Japan, is in preparation or in progress. All these plans are intended to fulfill the goals of a China that its leaders and many of its people believe is in ascendance and destined to become the main power in the world.

This idea that the U.S.-led West is suffering an unstoppable decline while China is enjoying an unstoppable rise is why in 2010 Chinese foreign policy became exceedingly aggressive and, as a result, China antagonized much of the world and drove all its neighbors either to increase their defense budgets or seek a rapprochement with the United States for protection. As political commentator Stephen Hill points out, “Beyond economic and ecological indicators, the hallmark of a great power is when other nations want to emulate you… But no one is banging down doors to get into China, and only the poorest countries aim to be like the People’s Republic.” Some nonpolitical Chinese scholars do return to China to work, even after obtaining their getaway pass in the form of permanent residency or citizenship in the United States or some other democratic country; while most of the poor nations that want to follow the Beijing model of development are ruled by unscrupulous dictators out for the main chance.

Further evidence of the realism and relevance of this novel has just appeared. As I write these pages, two autocratic regimes have fallen in the Middle East due to popular protests, and some others are in danger of falling. The reaction of the Chinese Communist party-state was to mandate a ban on independent media reports on the Middle East and on any local disturbances; the government called for increased control of the Internet, cell phone messages, Twitter, and microblogs, and made preparations for a complete Internet shutdown; it also stepped up police detention and harassment of all known democracy advocates. This is all of a piece with their treatment of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, whose wife is presently under house arrest.

In The Fat Years, even those chic intellectuals like Lao Chen may become uneasy about China’s potential to become frightening in the future; all they can do about their unease, however, is what the 2000 Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gao Xingjian advised-escape. The reality of geopolitics demonstrates that it will probably be a long time before He Dongsheng and the Chinese Communist Party’s dream of Chinese world hegemony is fulfilled, if ever. But the question remains: would this hegemony be the free, just, and civilized power that so many of its concerned citizens hope for? In the meantime, The Fat Years provides the most interesting and enlightening way for us to understand both the possible future of China and what it is like for many urban Chinese to live in the belly of the Chinese Leviathan.

I would like to thank Josephine Chiu-Duke for her thoughtful suggestions concerning the interpretation of this novel and for considerable help with the translation.

MICHAEL DUKE, FEBRUARY 2011

TRANSLATOR’S ENDNOTES

Master Chen: The literal translation would be “Teacher Chen,” but this is not a recognized form of address in English.

The sweet smell of books in a literary society: A common Chinese saying, as in “a whiff of refinement.”

Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour: After Deng Xiaoping formally retired, he still remained in power. His “reform” policies were threatened after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, so in 1992 Deng took a long tour through southern China and made several speeches announcing his continued support for economic reforms. At this time he may or may not have said “to get rich is glorious.” Deng’s reforms continued under the new leader, Jiang Zemin.

Ji Xianlin said the twenty-first century is the Chinese century: Ji Xianlin (1911-2009) was a celebrated Chinese linguist and Indologist.

This year is the year of my zodiac sign, and a lot of strange things are bound to happen: The Chinese believe that the year of a person’s zodiac sign, coming once every twelve years, is unlucky, and so one has to be very careful throughout that year.

They treat the Taiwanese like their little brothers: China’s party-state government has long regarded Taiwan as a renegade province, and the 85 percent of Taiwanese on the island (as opposed to 15 percent of mainlanders) are considered of lower status than mainlanders.

The Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp: Also known as Rennie’s Mill, this was a special settlement created by the Hong Kong government for Nationalist (Kuomintang) soldiers and supporters after they lost the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Chen Yingzhen: A Taiwanese leftist writer and political activist (b. 1936) who spent several years in prison in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

ethnic conflict was growing increasingly acrimonious: This is a reference to the feuds between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders. Chen Shuibian, president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008, pressed for