Over the past 40 years, China has managed to achieve levels of growth and development that would have been unimaginable during earlier decades of communist rule. But as the exiled Chinese novelist Ma Jian reminds us, that progress has been built on a foundation of repression and the corpses of his fellow citizens.
Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, Translated by Flora Drew, MacMillan, 2009. Ma Jian, The Dark Road, Translated by Flora Drew, Penguin Random House, 2014. Ma Jian, China Dream, Translated by Flora Drew, Penguin UK, 2018.
LONDON – Search for the name Ma Jian on the Internet and you will most likely land on Wikipedia, where there are listings for two men with the same name and one thing in common: neither would turn up if the same Internet search were conducted in mainland China.
The first Ma Jian is a Chinese-born writer whose novels are sure to make him a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature someday, assuming that he is not already under consideration. Now an artist in exile, his work is banned in his home country, where he would be denied entry if he ever tried to visit.
The second Ma Jian represents many of the things that Ma the novelist denounces in his brilliant imaginative works. Formerly Vice Minister of State Security and Vice President of the China Law Society, this Ma was investigated for corruption and expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2016. With mistresses and illegitimate children, as well as a side gig (allegedly) selling forged travel documents, he personifies the abuse of official power in China. If he still held his previous position, he would be among the first to denounce his namesake’s literary efforts to revive China’s collective memory and restore its sense of public morality and civic responsibility.
The Search for Memory
The Ma novels under review have three things in common. Each, in its own way, reflects the defining quality of Dai Wei, the protagonist of Beijing Coma. A biology student who has been shot during the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, Dai lives on for over a decade in his mother’s rickety flat, his body comatose but his mind alert. Dai is described as “a strong resilient person who remembers.” And only memory, Ma writes, “can help people regain the brightness of freedom.”
Photo: Ma Jian in Tiananmen Square
In any civilized society, memory – of both the good and the bad – is a foundation for long-term resilience and stability. When dictators try to blot out remembrance of the past, it is because they know that collective and institutional memory can pose a challenge to their unbridled exercise of power. Historical dialogue, debates, and investigations are regarded as tools of insurrection.
Ma is remorseless in reminding us of the abuses and tragedies that have been visited upon the Chinese people under CPC rule. In Beijing Coma, Dai’s girlfriend asks him to stop telling her horror stories of China’s recent history, declaring that she “can’t take any more.” Still, the relentless litany of social and political injustice that Ma provides is tolerable for the reader, not least because he regularly injects wit and gallows humor into it. His truth-telling is an important antidote to the CPC propaganda about China’s glorious rise.
Ma, it must be said, is not denouncing China itself, but rather its communist leadership. The second commonality between his books is that their heroes – whom he rarely treats uncritically – are always Chinese men and women who insist on retaining their individual integrity. Each is driven by the need for recollection of what has happened – and is currently happening – to their country and civilization.
The third commonality between these novels is that they are all beautifully translated by Ma’s wife, Flora Drew. Superb translators do not always get the praise they deserve. Drew has done a great service to English-language readers. Her rendering of Ma’s prose is direct, succinct, and moving.
The One-Child Nightmare
In The Dark Road, the heroine, Meili, and her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, must flee from the brutal sterilization police, the enforcers of China’s notorious one-child policy. Like countless other Chinese couples after 1980, Meili and Kongzi are told that “an enemy of the family planning policies is an enemy of the state.” The party slogan, Ma tells us, is: “Sever the fallopian tubes of poverty; insert the IUDs of prosperity.”
In the event, Meili must suffer through a brutal abortion while tied down to a steel surgical bed. As a direct descendent of Confucius, Kongzi is desperate for a male heir. And just as Confucius had “to wander through the country like a stray dog” after being banished from the State of Lu, so must Meili and Kongzi abscond in a boat and become wandering vagrants.
Meili and Kongzi soon find themselves in a toxic wasteland inhabited by other itinerant workers. Eventually, they make their way to a place called “Heaven Township.” That name, we soon learn, alludes to the fact that the village is so polluted as to make its inhabitants infertile. There is no need for the family-planning police here; but, of course, Heaven Township is really just a different version of hell.
In exposing the macabre underside of China’s one-child policy, Ma is describing a system in which the very of idea of humanity is aborted. The policy has since been relaxed, owing to the government’s worries about China’s aging population. But the best way to manage population growth is never through state control of women’s wombs. Educating girls, ensuring equal employment opportunity for women, maintaining economic growth, and ensuring access to inexpensive and reliable contraception are far more effective measures.
Hide the Bodies
In Beijing Coma, Ma reminds us of what really happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As the United Kingdom’s minister of overseas development at the time, I witnessed the early stages of that crisis in Beijing; but I did not see its bloody conclusion.
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To this day, the massacre remains a repressed memory in China. My wife and I know a teacher with students from both mainland China and Hong Kong, and he tells us that the mainlanders had no idea about the killings until recently. When they look up Tiananmen Square on the Internet, they learn merely that it is the physical center of Beijing. They were quite astonished to see what turned up in their Hong Kong classmates’ uncensored Google search.
In Ma’s novel, another protester in the square reports to Dai that, “They’ve just let off another smoke bomb. They don’t want anyone to see the bodies.” Indeed, ever since the massacre, the CPC has been remarkably successful in concealing it, expunging the murders not just from the official record, but also from public memory.
Nevertheless, the bodies were real. In Ma’s vivid rendering of the carnage, we learn that one of Dai’s friends has been rolled into the tarmac by the tanks. “Her face was completely flat,” he writes. “A mess of black hair obscured her elongated mouth.”
Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century – the century that China will come to dominate, or so we are often told.
Shattered Dreams
Ma’s most recent novel, China Dream, is a satirical fable. Its cover was designed by Ai Weiwei, a fellow artist in exile whose Beijing studio, including many finished and unfinished works, was recently demolished on the Chinese regime’s orders.
Photo: Ma Jian and Ai Weiwei
Appropriately, the novel itself confronts the hubris of the CPC’s ambition to become the ruling party of the world, exemplified by a party chief’s declaration that “the ruling party of China must become the ruling party of humanity.” In Chinese President Xi Jinping’s telling, “Xi Jinping Thought” is destined for the global stage. Never mind that his “Chinese Dream” requires that all private dreams be paved over, as when the foundations for redeveloped villages are laid over the graves of those slaughtered in the name of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
To be sure, Ma’s novels do not ignore the extraordinary achievements that the world’s most populous country has made over the last four decades. Nor do they encourage us to deny reality. China will soon be the world’s largest economy, as it was for 18 of the last 20 centuries. Ma does not want to see China fail, and no one else should, either. A weak China would not be in the interest of its citizens or the rest of the world.
Still, Ma’s novels pose legitimate, critical questions about China’s rise after a century of humiliation, invasion, and civil war. Did the country’s rebirth really have to be built on a foundation of repression and the corpses of its own citizens? Does a political model that criminalizes the yearning for justice, accountability, knowledge, and free speech really constitute a sustainable way to govern a great country?
Repressed history, like repressed memory, has a way of creeping back to the surface one way or another. Ma’s work should be read by anyone who is interested in understanding the human costs of CPC rule in China over the past 70 years, and by all who refuse to accept that liberty can be snuffed out indefinitely.
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Ma Jian, The Dark Road, Translated by Flora Drew, Penguin Random House, 2014.
Ma Jian, China Dream, Translated by Flora Drew, Penguin UK, 2018.
LONDON – Search for the name Ma Jian on the Internet and you will most likely land on Wikipedia, where there are listings for two men with the same name and one thing in common: neither would turn up if the same Internet search were conducted in mainland China.
The first Ma Jian is a Chinese-born writer whose novels are sure to make him a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature someday, assuming that he is not already under consideration. Now an artist in exile, his work is banned in his home country, where he would be denied entry if he ever tried to visit.
The second Ma Jian represents many of the things that Ma the novelist denounces in his brilliant imaginative works. Formerly Vice Minister of State Security and Vice President of the China Law Society, this Ma was investigated for corruption and expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2016. With mistresses and illegitimate children, as well as a side gig (allegedly) selling forged travel documents, he personifies the abuse of official power in China. If he still held his previous position, he would be among the first to denounce his namesake’s literary efforts to revive China’s collective memory and restore its sense of public morality and civic responsibility.
The Search for Memory
The Ma novels under review have three things in common. Each, in its own way, reflects the defining quality of Dai Wei, the protagonist of Beijing Coma. A biology student who has been shot during the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, Dai lives on for over a decade in his mother’s rickety flat, his body comatose but his mind alert. Dai is described as “a strong resilient person who remembers.” And only memory, Ma writes, “can help people regain the brightness of freedom.”
In any civilized society, memory – of both the good and the bad – is a foundation for long-term resilience and stability. When dictators try to blot out remembrance of the past, it is because they know that collective and institutional memory can pose a challenge to their unbridled exercise of power. Historical dialogue, debates, and investigations are regarded as tools of insurrection.
Ma is remorseless in reminding us of the abuses and tragedies that have been visited upon the Chinese people under CPC rule. In Beijing Coma, Dai’s girlfriend asks him to stop telling her horror stories of China’s recent history, declaring that she “can’t take any more.” Still, the relentless litany of social and political injustice that Ma provides is tolerable for the reader, not least because he regularly injects wit and gallows humor into it. His truth-telling is an important antidote to the CPC propaganda about China’s glorious rise.
Ma, it must be said, is not denouncing China itself, but rather its communist leadership. The second commonality between his books is that their heroes – whom he rarely treats uncritically – are always Chinese men and women who insist on retaining their individual integrity. Each is driven by the need for recollection of what has happened – and is currently happening – to their country and civilization.
The third commonality between these novels is that they are all beautifully translated by Ma’s wife, Flora Drew. Superb translators do not always get the praise they deserve. Drew has done a great service to English-language readers. Her rendering of Ma’s prose is direct, succinct, and moving.
The One-Child Nightmare
In The Dark Road, the heroine, Meili, and her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, must flee from the brutal sterilization police, the enforcers of China’s notorious one-child policy. Like countless other Chinese couples after 1980, Meili and Kongzi are told that “an enemy of the family planning policies is an enemy of the state.” The party slogan, Ma tells us, is: “Sever the fallopian tubes of poverty; insert the IUDs of prosperity.”
In the event, Meili must suffer through a brutal abortion while tied down to a steel surgical bed. As a direct descendent of Confucius, Kongzi is desperate for a male heir. And just as Confucius had “to wander through the country like a stray dog” after being banished from the State of Lu, so must Meili and Kongzi abscond in a boat and become wandering vagrants.
Meili and Kongzi soon find themselves in a toxic wasteland inhabited by other itinerant workers. Eventually, they make their way to a place called “Heaven Township.” That name, we soon learn, alludes to the fact that the village is so polluted as to make its inhabitants infertile. There is no need for the family-planning police here; but, of course, Heaven Township is really just a different version of hell.
In exposing the macabre underside of China’s one-child policy, Ma is describing a system in which the very of idea of humanity is aborted. The policy has since been relaxed, owing to the government’s worries about China’s aging population. But the best way to manage population growth is never through state control of women’s wombs. Educating girls, ensuring equal employment opportunity for women, maintaining economic growth, and ensuring access to inexpensive and reliable contraception are far more effective measures.
Hide the Bodies
In Beijing Coma, Ma reminds us of what really happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As the United Kingdom’s minister of overseas development at the time, I witnessed the early stages of that crisis in Beijing; but I did not see its bloody conclusion.
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To this day, the massacre remains a repressed memory in China. My wife and I know a teacher with students from both mainland China and Hong Kong, and he tells us that the mainlanders had no idea about the killings until recently. When they look up Tiananmen Square on the Internet, they learn merely that it is the physical center of Beijing. They were quite astonished to see what turned up in their Hong Kong classmates’ uncensored Google search.
In Ma’s novel, another protester in the square reports to Dai that, “They’ve just let off another smoke bomb. They don’t want anyone to see the bodies.” Indeed, ever since the massacre, the CPC has been remarkably successful in concealing it, expunging the murders not just from the official record, but also from public memory.
Nevertheless, the bodies were real. In Ma’s vivid rendering of the carnage, we learn that one of Dai’s friends has been rolled into the tarmac by the tanks. “Her face was completely flat,” he writes. “A mess of black hair obscured her elongated mouth.”
Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century – the century that China will come to dominate, or so we are often told.
Shattered Dreams
Ma’s most recent novel, China Dream, is a satirical fable. Its cover was designed by Ai Weiwei, a fellow artist in exile whose Beijing studio, including many finished and unfinished works, was recently demolished on the Chinese regime’s orders.
Appropriately, the novel itself confronts the hubris of the CPC’s ambition to become the ruling party of the world, exemplified by a party chief’s declaration that “the ruling party of China must become the ruling party of humanity.” In Chinese President Xi Jinping’s telling, “Xi Jinping Thought” is destined for the global stage. Never mind that his “Chinese Dream” requires that all private dreams be paved over, as when the foundations for redeveloped villages are laid over the graves of those slaughtered in the name of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
To be sure, Ma’s novels do not ignore the extraordinary achievements that the world’s most populous country has made over the last four decades. Nor do they encourage us to deny reality. China will soon be the world’s largest economy, as it was for 18 of the last 20 centuries. Ma does not want to see China fail, and no one else should, either. A weak China would not be in the interest of its citizens or the rest of the world.
Still, Ma’s novels pose legitimate, critical questions about China’s rise after a century of humiliation, invasion, and civil war. Did the country’s rebirth really have to be built on a foundation of repression and the corpses of its own citizens? Does a political model that criminalizes the yearning for justice, accountability, knowledge, and free speech really constitute a sustainable way to govern a great country?
Repressed history, like repressed memory, has a way of creeping back to the surface one way or another. Ma’s work should be read by anyone who is interested in understanding the human costs of CPC rule in China over the past 70 years, and by all who refuse to accept that liberty can be snuffed out indefinitely.