Just a quick post on the new Chinese novel The Fat Years China 2013 (盛世 中国 2013年) that just came out in Hong Kong.  It was written by a John Chan (陳冠中), a Hong Kong native who currently lives in Beijing.  His novel takes place in the year 2013 when China is in a period of prosperity and general happiness, while at the same time Western countries, lead by America, have fallen into another far more catastrophic financial crisis that has brought destruction to every country in the world other than China.  What will this China of 2013 look like?  In the book the State will have expanded its control over all aspects of the economy and society, all in the name of stability and prosperity.  The main character is a writer from Taiwan who has moved to Beijing and “discovers that a month (filled with rioting and other mayhem) has gone missing out of everyone’s lives…just disappeared.  He sets out to find out exactly what happened.”

It’s being billed as a 1984 for our day and age, a modern day update for George Orwell’s masterpiece.  It has been published in Hong Kong by Oxford University Press and will soon be available in Taiwan, and will, of course, never be officially published in mainland China.  On the Publishing Perspectives blog (where you can also download a detailed English summary of the novel) Marysia Juszczakiewicz of the new Peony Literary agency is quoted as saying:

“The book is reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 and will not be published on the mainland. Copies have been smuggled in and are available under the counter. There is a buzz on the blogs about it. It think it’s the type of book that really taps into the China of today.”

Over at Global Voices, where I’m first read about this book (via Danwei), they share some of the social conditions of the book as described by Zhang Tiezhi (张铁志) of Taiwan’s China Times newspaper.  The original Chinese can be found here, all translations are taken from Global Voices.

Western countries faced another economic crisis in 2011 and entered a prolonged ‘ice and fire’ period of stagnation.  China, unharmed, becomes even stronger and more confident than today. People are happy, or even ‘high’. The Age of China has arrived.

The main character said: ‘I know China still has a lot of problems. But think about it, the developed capitalist countries, headed by the US, have destroyed themselves. They have only recovered from the 2008 crisis for a few years, and are now in deep troubles again… Only China can spare itself of the crisis… Not only has China rewritten the rules of the global economy, it has also maintained social harmony. You cannot but appreciate this.’

In the year of 2013 described by the book, Beijing’s most important humanities bookshop, Wansheng, has closed down. The important liberal magazine, Southern Weekend, has ceased to exist. You cannot find in any bookstores books about the anti-right campaigns and Cultural Revolution. Newspapers which recorded past periods of social instability are all gone. The few people who insist on having a memory of history are marginalized, or even treated as insane.

Global Voices also translated a “twitter broadcast”, organized by the blogger Du Ting (杜婷), where the author, John Chan, touched on issues of freedom.  These few lines really hit the mark in my mind (again, translations taken from Global Voices):

With the inequality between happiness and freedom, resulting in happiness without freedom, could the world sustain itself naturally? In mainland, we can see that official ‘newspeaks’ are becoming more and more common. In the 1980s, the Chinese society went through a period of self-reflections. Ba Jin spoke out, and spoke the truth. But in these years, we have fallen back. We have lost the freedom to speak the truth.  Why does [the government] become unhappy once the words used are inappropriate? We know that it would be terrible if there are only positive, but no negative, feedbacks. If China only has one voice, it will lose the ability to self-correct. Therefore, freedom is very important.

I bring up this new book not merely because of my serious love for futuristic dystopian novels, but also so people can stop and realize just how murky China’s future is.  When I contemplate why I’m spending so much time living in China and studying its language the one big argument that always comes to mind is: China’s future, whatever it may be, will no doubt be exciting.  Sure the CCP controlled government would have you believe that China’s future will harmoniously progress forward as material prosperity and social stability rise together, but I don’t think any intelligent person who has been reading the news coming out of China would buy into such a rosy and over-simplified future.  Having a new novel out that deals with China’s near future in such a politically dangerous and thought provoking way is very interesting to me and I really want a copy.