China Dream Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ma Jian

  Praise for Ma Jian’s Books

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Befuddled by spring dreams

  Sharing the same bed, dreaming different dreams

  Dreams evaporate, wealth trickles away

  Dreaming your life away in a drunken haze

  Life floats by like a dream

  Beguiled by empty pipe dreams

  The dream of the red tower

  A note about the cover

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A poetic and unflinching fable about tyranny, guilt, and the erasure of history, by the banned Chinese writer hailed as ‘China’s Solzhenitsyn’.

  In seven dream-like episodes, Ma Jian charts the psychological disintegration of a Chinese provincial leader who is haunted by nightmares of his violent past. From exile, Ma Jian shoots an arrow at President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’ propaganda, creating a biting satire of totalitarianism that reveals what happens to a nation when it is blinded by materialism and governed by violence and lies. Blending tragic and absurd reality with myth and fantasy, this dystopian novel is a portrait not of an imagined future, but of China today.

  About the Author

  MA JIAN was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He is the author of Stick Out Your Tongue, his debut novel which in 1987 led to the permanent banning of his books in China; Red Dust, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; four collections of short stories and essays; and six further novels, including Beijing Coma, winner of the Index on Censorship Book Award and the Athens Prize for Literature. His last book, The Dark Road, nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, saw him barred from returning to China. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He now lives in exile in London.

  ALSO BY MA JIAN

  Red Dust

  The Noodle Maker

  Stick Out Your Tongue

  Beijing Coma

  The Dark Road

  PRAISE FOR MA JIAN’S BOOKS

  ‘A landmark work of fiction’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Worthy of Swift or Orwell’ Observer

  ‘A modern literary masterpiece’ Sunday Express

  ‘Monumental … Riveting … A mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence’ Guardian

  ‘A born storyteller who has the artistry and intellect to evoke a staggeringly large and densely peopled world. His language is precise and sublimely visual; it is painfully funny’ Madeleine Thien

  ‘In scene after scene of black satire, lyric tenderness and desolating tragedy … this fearless epic of history and memory establishes Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world domination’ Independent

  ‘Ma Jian has accomplished something extremely difficult. That is, he has created a work of art that functions simultaneously as literature and call to action’ New York Review of Books

  Foreword

  In November 2012, two weeks after being crowned General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and a few months before being appointed President, Xi Jinping visited the lavishly refurbished National Museum of China, a vast Stalinist structure on the eastern edge of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square directly opposite the Mao Mausoleum. With six other black-suited, blank-faced members of the Politbureau Standing Committee, he wandered through ‘The Road to Rejuvenation’, a huge exhibition that charts China’s modern history from the First Opium War of 1839 to the present day. In room after room, photographs and artefacts chronicle China’s humiliation at the hands of colonial powers, the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the nation’s subsequent rise under Communist Party rule. But nowhere in this cavernous exhibition space is there any mention of the catastrophes inflicted by Chairman Mao and his successors, such as the Great Leap Forward, a reckless campaign to transform China into a Communist utopia, which caused a famine that claimed over twenty million lives; the mass psychosis of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into a decade of mob violence, chaos and stagnation; and the 1989 massacre of peaceful pro-democracy protestors in the streets around Tiananmen Square. In this museum, and in the bookshops and classrooms outside it, China’s post-1949 history is cleansed of darkness and reduced to an anodyne, joyful fairy tale.

  At the end of his visit, Xi Jinping announced his ‘China Dream of national rejuvenation’, promising that continued Communist rule would lead to even greater economic wealth and restore China to its past glory. Since then, this vague and nebulous slogan has formed the bedrock of his administration. Like the despots who preceded him, he has strengthened his grip on power by suppressing information about the hell that Communism has caused and promising a future paradise. But utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship. As I write, China’s rubber-stamp parliament has abolished limits on presidential terms, allowing Xi Jinping to remain president for life. The clumsily titled ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ has been enshrined in the constitution. And recently, the education minister pledged that ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ will go into textbooks, classrooms and ‘the brains of students’.

  China’s tyrants have never limited themselves to controlling people’s lives: they have always sought to enter people’s brains and remould them from the inside. In fact, it was the Chinese Communists in the 1950s who coined the term ‘brainwashing’ (‘xinao’). The China Dream is another beautiful lie concocted by the state to remove dark memories from Chinese brains and replace them with happy thoughts. Decades of indoctrination, propaganda, violence and untruths have left the Chinese people so numb and confused, they have lost the ability to tell fact from fiction. They have swallowed the lie that the Party leaders are responsible for the country’s economic miracle, rather than the vast army of low-paid workers. The rabid consumerism encouraged in the last thirty years and which, along with inflated nationalism, lies at the heart of the China Dream is turning the Chinese into overgrown children who are fed, clothed and entertained, but have no right to remember the past or ask questions.

  But a writer’s job is to probe the darkness and, above all, to tell the truth. I wrote China Dream out of rage against the false utopias that have enslaved and infantilised China since 1949, and to reclaim the most brutal period of its recent history – the ‘violent struggle’ phase of the Cultural Revolution – from a regime that continues to repress it. The book is filled with absurdities, both real and invented. The China Dream Bureaus, Red Guard Nightclubs and mass wedding anniversary ceremonies for octogenarian couples, for example, really do exist in today’s China. The China Dream Soup and neural implant are of course products of my imagination. In my effort to express a higher literary truth, my novels have always melded fact with fiction.

  Thirty years ago, I wrote my first book, a fictional meditation on Tibet called Stick Out Your Tongue. A few weeks after it was published, the government condemned it as ‘spiritual pollution’ and ordered all copies to be rounded up and destroyed. Since then, every novel I have written has been banned in the mainland. My name is excluded from official lists of Chinese writers and compendiums of Chinese fiction; it can’t even be mentioned in the press. And worse still, for the last six years, the government has denied me the right to return. But I continue to ‘write, write, write’, like the father of China Dream’s protagonist. I continue to take refuge in the beauty of the Chinese language and use it to drag memories out from the fog of state-imposed amnesia, to deride and mock China’s despots and sympathise with their victims, while remaining conscious that in evil dictatorships, most people are bo
th oppressor and oppressed.

  And despite everything, I have not yet surrendered completely to pessimism. I still believe that truth and beauty are transcendental forces that will outlive man-made tyrannies. I hope that perhaps by the time my children reach my age, one or two of my novels might be found in a bookshop in China. More importantly, I hope that the Chinese Communist Party, that has imprisoned the minds and brutalised the bodies of the Chinese people for almost seventy years, and whose growing influence is beginning to corrupt democracies around the world, will be consigned to dusty exhibition rooms of the National Museum. When that day arrives, I hope the Chinese people will be able to confront the nightmares of the past, speak the truth as they see it without fear of reprisal and follow dreams of their own making, their minds and hearts unchained.

  Ma Jian

  London, March 2018

  Befuddled by spring dreams

  The instant that Ma Daode, director of the newly created China Dream Bureau, wakes from his snooze, he discovers that the adolescent self he has just dreamed about has not disappeared but is standing right in front of him. It is an afternoon in late spring, and he has been dozing in his swivel chair, his shoulders hunched over and his pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat. This is the clearest indication yet that dreamlike episodes from his past, buried deep in his memory, are rising to the surface again.

  ‘What a negative dream – it didn’t generate any positive energy at all,’ he mumbles grumpily. ‘My fault for falling asleep in my chair.’ He drank too much at lunch and dozed off at his desk before having a chance to lie down, so his mind is still muddled. The door behind him leads to a private bedroom with an adjoining bathroom – a four-star privilege awarded only to leaders of municipal rank. His office is on the fifth floor.

  The scroll hanging beside the door bears a line of poetry: I DREAM OF FLOWERS BLOOMING FROM THE TIP OF MY BRUSH, which was written, or rather composed, by Mayor Chen last month at the China Dream Bureau’s official opening. Mayor Chen usually charges huge fees for writing his own poems on scrolls at official gatherings, but on this occasion he agreed to simply recite the line and let Ma Daode transcribe it at a later date. Ma Daode has not achieved the same level of literary fame. Last year, he self-published a thousand copies of his essay collection, Cautionary Sayings for the Modern World, five hundred of which are still stacked, unsold, inside the cupboard behind him.

  Now that the bottled-up memories of his youth have begun to escape, this Ma Daode who grew up in the Cultural Revolution, this high official charged with promoting the great China Dream that will replace all private dreams, is afraid that his job will become imperilled. His past self and present existence are as antagonistic to one another as fire and water.

  At this morning’s meeting, he got carried away. ‘Our new president, Xi Jinping, has set forth his vision of the future,’ he told the assembled twenty-seven members of staff. ‘He has conjured up a China Dream of national rejuvenation. It is not the selfish, individualist dream chased by Western countries. It is a dream of the people, a dream of the whole nation, united as one and gathered together into an invincible force. We have been urged to press ahead with indomitable will. Our job, in this Bureau, is to ensure that the China Dream enters the brain of every resident of Ziyang City. It seems clear to me that if the communal China Dream is to fully impregnate the mind, all private remembrances and dreams must first be washed away. And I, Ma Daode, volunteer to wash my brain first. I suggest we start work straight away on developing a neural implant, a tiny microchip, which we could call the China Dream Device. When the prototype is ready, I will insert it into my head, like this, and any dream from my past still lingering there will vanish into thin air …’ At this, he stood up and mimed pushing the microchip into his ear. It is only now, having seen his past self appear before him, that he can sense what trouble his unearthed memories might cause.

  HEY MR DIRTY DREAM, HERE’S A RIDDLE POEM FOR YOU, he reads, glancing down at a text from his mistress, Yuyu. ‘A SAPLING OPENS ITS EYES. A BOY SLEEPS BENEATH A HOUSE. A HOLE EMERGES IN YOUR CONSCIENCE. THE SUN SETS BEHIND A WOUNDED RABBIT.’ CAN YOU WORK OUT WHICH FAMOUS LINE OF POETRY IS HIDDEN INSIDE IT? Resembling A Toad Peeping Out From A Pond, Director Ma looks up, his bulging eyes sparkling with excitement. He may not have achieved Mayor Chen’s literary renown, but still, he is vice chair of Ziyang’s Writers’ Association, and has gained a small following from aphorisms which he posts online, so this riddle should not be beyond him. Sure enough, in a matter of seconds he finds the word hidden in the character strokes of each sentence and texts back the answer: HOW THEY REGRET NOT MEETING BEFORE.

  His secretary, Hu, a quiet, middle-aged man who is slightly balder than him, walks into the office. ‘I’ve invited the Disabled Association to this afternoon’s Party meeting, Director Ma,’ he says without expression. ‘Anything else you’d like me to do?’ Director Ma always chooses to have male secretaries to avoid romantic entanglements with close colleagues, mindful of the maxim that ‘rabbits should never nibble the grass close to their burrows’. In his last job as vice chair of the Civility Office, however, Yuyu came for an interview fresh out of Beijing University, and he was so dazzled by her beauty he couldn’t resist hiring her as his personal assistant. He is relieved they no longer work in the same office. After his promotion to the China Dream Bureau, his old post was filled by his former classmate, Song Bin. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he and Song Bin climbed telegraph poles together to scatter political pamphlets onto their school playground, locked their headmaster in his office and seized control of the school’s public address system. But a year later, after the initial revolutionary unity dissolved into the factional chaos of the violent struggle, they found themselves on opposing sides and their friendship crumbled. Fortunately, the monkey-faced Song Bin has more mistresses than he can handle, so is unlikely to steal Yuyu from him.

  ‘Invite the head of the Internet Monitoring Unit as well,’ Ma Daode tells Hu, returning the phone to his pocket. ‘The Bureau will be merging with them soon, so he’ll need to be in the loop.’ He exhales slowly and senses the alcohol on his breath seep into his hair.

  ‘But he’s not a Party member.’ Hu joined the municipal government six years ago after a long career as a secondary-school teacher. He is responsible for writing the progress reports that are sent to the Municipal Party Committee twice a day.

  ‘He’s submitted his application, though.’ As Ma Daode speaks, the adolescent self from his dream resurfaces and sees … Red slogans everywhere. Zealous youths marching in procession, faces tinted red by a sea of red flags. Mother on the corner of her bed, knitting a red jumper, a red armband pinned to her sleeve, looking just like the women who gather in parks in red Tang suits to sing ‘red songs’ from the Cultural Revolution. Ma Daode raises his hand, trying to banish these images. ‘Make sure you tape the whole meeting, Hu,’ he adds. ‘I’ll be making some important announcements.’ He is annoyed that just as he is about to present the new China Dream projects, dreamlike fragments from his past are disturbing his thoughts.

  ‘Yes, I’ll record it on my phone,’ Hu says impassively. His poker face and quiet reserve would make him an ideal secret agent. Ma Daode always feels uneasy in his presence. He says so little, Ma Daode is always left with the impression that he is hiding something, or that a piece is missing from his character.

  The phone in Ma Daode’s drawer vibrates. WHEN THE WIND BLOWS, IT’S ME WISHING I WAS WITH YOU; WHEN THUNDER ROARS, IT’S ME CRYING OUT YOUR NAME. He reads the text, switches the phone off and shifts his gaze to the framed family portrait on his desk, which shows him on the left in a white T-shirt, his wife Juan on the right in a red cotton dress, and between them his twelve-year-old daughter Ming who is now twenty and studying at university in England. The text he just received was from Changyan, a young kindergarten teacher who likes to write online fiction.

  He rubs his chin and gazes out at the huge new forecourt which is
being paved in limestone slabs. Never before has his mind been in such disarray. He wonders whether the ‘red song’ contest he organised recently is responsible for stirring up his buried memories. He thinks of the photograph of himself as a toddler in a sailor suit standing between his parents. Because his mother was dressed in a traditional cheongsam, his sister was afraid their family would be denounced as bourgeois, so she kept the photograph hidden for years. It was only at Spring Festival this year that she finally dared take it out and email a scanned copy to him.

  Last week, he posted two photographs on WeChat. The first one shows him with eleven other teenagers in front of the Buddha Light Temple in Yaobang Village, where they were sent after the violent struggle as part of Chairman Mao’s programme to re-educate urban youth through hard labour. He spent his time there as a ‘sent-down youth’ toiling in the fields and teaching in the village school. The second is a photograph of him wearing an army cap and green fatigues, dancing the male lead in the revolutionary ballet, The White-Haired Girl, after he was summoned back to Ziyang four years later to join the county propaganda troupe. Both photographs received many likes, and his mistress Yuyu gave them three grinning emojis.

  His eyes drift back to his wife in the family portrait … Do you remember how, after we joined the troupe, you and I would stroll down Drum Tower Street every evening? What a sight we were! You, skipping gracefully by my side, your long braid dangling to the small of your back. And me: slim-hipped, broad-shouldered, wearing the two-tone Italian brogues my father brought back from the Korean War. There were no other shoes like them in the whole of China. As the young people today would say: we looked cool. I admit, I had a flat arse and walked like a woman – but those were minor faults. Who would have guessed that Young Skinny Ma would become the Old Flabby Ma slumped here today?