The Fat Years
NAN A. TALESE
Doubleday
NEW YORK
LONDON
TORONTO
SYDNEY
AUCKLAND
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 2011 by Michael S. Duke
Preface copyright © 2011 by Julia Lovell
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.
DOUBLEDAY
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Hong Kong as
Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013
by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd., a subsidiary of Oxford University Press, in 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Chan Koonchung. This translation was originally published in Great Britain by Transworld Publishers, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2011.
Book design by Maria Carella
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chen, Guanzhong.
[Sheng shi. English]
The fat years: a novel / Chan Koonchung; translated from the Chinese by Michael S. Duke; with a preface by Julia Lovell.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. Beijing (China)—Fiction. 2. Political fiction. I. Duke, Michael S. II. Title.
PL2840.G84S5413 2011
895.1'352—dc22 2011014043
ISBN 978-0-385-53434-5
E
B
OOK
ISBN 978-0-385-53435-2
First American Edition
v3.1
Zhongguancun, China’s Silicon Valley in northwest Beijing, is a fine place to visit these days. In the thirty-odd years since China abandoned Maoism for market reforms, glass- and marble-fronted malls and five-star hotels, brimful of balloons, promotions, and the promise of the good life, have sprung up all over the capital; and Zhongguancun has its fair share of such high-rent establishments. The district’s grand shopping plaza sprawls across two hundred thousand square meters packed with boutiques, supermarkets, cinemas, eateries, and eager consumers. The area happens also to be the center of China’s elite institutions of higher education, home to China’s most privileged scholars and students. With its glittering temples to self-gratification and to state-approved academic endeavor, Zhongguancun is one of the flagships of the contemporary Chinese dream.
On December 23, 2010, at one of Zhongguancun’s police stations, a less harmonious episode was taking place. That evening, a Beijing law professor called Teng Biao decided to pay a visit to the mother of a friend. The friend, it so happened, was a human rights lawyer called Fan Yafeng, currently being held under house arrest by the authorities. Since Fan’s mother was at home on her own, Teng thought it would be courteous to look in on her. As soon as he entered the apartment, however, a plainclothes police officer stormed in and loudly demanded his ID, pushing him for good measure. Not long after, a gang of Public Security reinforcements arrived and dragged Teng back down the stairs (confiscating his glasses in the process, leaving him extremely shortsighted) and into a police van, and drove him to a nearby police station. There, more violence ensued—in which Teng’s hand was injured, his tie was violently yanked off, his legs were kicked, and he was sworn at—while he vainly quoted his citizen’s constitutional rights. “Why waste words on this sort of person?” one police officer asked in front of him. “Let’s beat him to death, dig a hole to bury him in, and be done with it.” Eventually they let him go but only, Teng suspected, because they were a little intimidated by his academic status and, more importantly perhaps, because a timely tweet—before the police tried to remove his mobile phone—had gathered some of his supporters outside the police station. Teng was lucky: one of his peers, the lawyer Gao Zhisheng, has been imprisoned for years, multiply beaten, burnt with cigarettes, and tortured with electric shocks on account of his advocacy on behalf of groups persecuted by the regime; another human rights advocate, Ni Yulan, has been crippled by her police interrogators and is currently under house arrest in a Beijing hotel lacking electricity and running water.
A short walk from Zhongguancun’s glass and neon palaces, another face of the contemporary Chinese miracle was showing itself. Welcome to the world of
The Fat Years.
Chan Koonchung’s
The Fat Years
describes a near-future world that, to a significant degree, already exists. This is a China in which a dictatorial Communist Party has guided the country safely through a global economic meltdown that has weakened the liberal democratic West but strengthened the appeal and prestige of an authoritarian Chinese model, enabling China to reassert its premodern status as the economic, political, and cultural center of the world. This is a China in which the majority of the urban population—despite the Party’s repressiveness and corruption, and ruthless censoring of history and the media—seem happy enough with a status quo that has delivered economic choice without political liberties; in which many once-critical voices have been marginalized or co-opted.
In early 2011, two years before the novel begins, the world is rocked by a second financial crisis that makes the shock of 2008 resemble a mere wobble, and during which the dollar loses a third of its value in a single day. Somehow sidestepping the economic Armageddon that hits the West, the People’s Republic of China instead immediately enters what its communist government officially names a “Golden Age” of prosperity and contentment. No one in a placid Beijing of 2013 seems to have anything negative to say about the country; all unhappy memories have been erased, as urbanites busy themselves with self-gratification. Our guide to this paradise on earth is Chen, a Taiwanese–Hong Kong writer who has over the past few years made China his new home. He spends his time socializing, going to literary events and parties, browsing in bookshops, or sipping Lychee Black Dragon Latte in Beijing’s Starbucks (which, following the collapse of the dollar, has had to sell out to a Taiwanese snacks consortium). “I felt so spiritually and materially satisfied,” he summarizes, “and my life was so incomparably blessed, that I began to experience an overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I never had before.” China’s awkward squad—the minority of critics who have poked and jibed at the regime since public opposition became possible again after Mao’s death—has been intimidated, isolated, or mainstreamed into silence, leaving an intellectual establishment dominated by complacent national treasures, trendy young things, or fascistic Party ideologues. The novel’s atmosphere of overwhelming self-congratulation is resisted only by a handful of individuals determined to remember less happy times and to ask why everyone else has forgotten them. We meet an old flame of Chen’s, Little Xi, a drop-out lawyer-turned-democratic-protestor of the 1980s; Fang Caodi, a hippie globetrotter who is looking for China’s “lost month”—the four hellish weeks of martial law imposed after the economic collapse of 2011 in which countless civilians died, and which is now mysteriously wiped from public memory; and Zhang Dou, a former victim of government-condoned slave labor.
It was, Chan Koonchung has observed, China’s current situation that inspired the novel. “I got the idea for the book from responses to the financial crisis of 2008—I’d been plotting a novel about China for some time, but that gave me a moment, a focus. That year, as the West reeled from the financial mess while China escaped unscathed, it seemed that everyone—from officials down to ordinary urbanites—began to feel that China was doing well for itself, that there was nothing more to learn from the West, that China can argue back … The public have now bought enthusiastically into China’s authoritarian model.” The construction of an authoritarian harmony has always been implicit in communist theory and practice, but this became official policy after 2007, when President Hu Jintao exhorted “all people [to] coexist harmoniously, love and help each other, encourage each other, and make an effort to contribute to the building of a harmonious society.”
In recent years, China’s communist government has indeed succeeded—perhaps beyond its wildest dreams—in muffling critical voices. The 1980s were choppy times for the regime, as China’s chattering classes debated the disasters of Maoism, and whether there was any place for Marxism in economic and political liberalization. As China stumbled toward a market economy and as inflation rocketed throughout the decade, the conviction grew that the government’s reforms weren’t working and the leadership had not persuaded the populace that they could lead. The most avant-garde rebels—such as the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo—speculated that China could experience “great historical change” only if it had been colonized like Hong Kong was after the Opium War of 1839–42. (“China is so big,” he added as a provocative after-thought, “that naturally it would need three hundred years of colonization to become like Hong Kong.”) From the middecade onward, urban China was given pause, every year, by student protests—over the lack of government transparency; over the rising cost of food; over the rats in their dorms—culminating in the two-month occupation of Tiananmen Square from April to June 1989. The demonstrations’ bloody denouement was an international and domestic PR disaster for China’s communist government: while Western politicians and overseas Chinese called for economic and political sanctions, hundreds of thousands of sobbing Chinese people came out in protest in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Western cities, comparing the People’s Republic to Nazi Germany and spray-painting the national flag with swastikas.
Fast-forward to the present day, and China’s communist rulers have effectively neutralized many of their former opponents. “For years,” as one analyst has observed, “the Beijing regime has stayed in power using a basic bargain with its citizens—tolerate our authoritarian rule and we’ll make you rich.” Confounding Western prophets of communist apocalypse, China’s post-1989 leaders accelerated economic reforms, while backpedaling on political 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, cafés, 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.”