China-- Your impressions?

What do you think about China? I know it's a huge topic, but what comes to mind when you think of China? What's your first reaction? Have you been to China or would you like to go?

I've been to China three times, each time to adopt a baby girl. My trips were in 1994, 1998, and 2003, almost a ten-year span. In the space of those years, the pace of growth was amazing. New highways spring up from nowhere. In 1994, people streamed by in the streets on bicycles. Now the roads are jammed with cars.

The unfairness of government spending is pitiful.

The growth and wealth of China along the east coast is conspicuous, but the bulk of the population--millions of people--work on the land for their subsistence. There are even places where people do not have heating, indoor plumbing (no toilet), or electricity.

The life of the peasant is painfully hard. In many locations, the corrupt Party cadres level exhorbitant taxes on the peasantry to line their own pockets.

And the visible wealth in the major cities is criminal in contrast to the average urban or rural dweller. In a traffic jam near Guangzhou the highway was filled with Mercedes and BMWs.

I've read a lot about China in the 20th century, pre-Mao, the Mao era, and post-Mao, and the suffering of people into even the 1970s was catastrophic. Millions died during the war with Japan, the civil war, the famine produced by the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

The practice of foot-binding reached even into the 1940s. Millions of beautiful young girls were deliberately put through excruciating pain to achieve small feet where the feet were deformed beyond belief. Many women with bound feet could hardly stand and walk. Millions of mothers put their daughters through this evil ordeal.

The Party's brutal treatment of people, from Tiananmen Square to the arrest of Ai Weiwei, represents a government that is strongly repressive and blind to individual rights and human right.

Parents will abort babies when ultrasound proves the fetus to be a girl. In some locations the ratio of girls to boys is 100/115. Infant abandonment is a scourge to the nation. Children with handicaps are frequently abandoned. Orphanages can't cope with the amount of handicapped children and babies in its care, and as with many other social welfare needs, the government provides a pittance of relief to needy causes. There is money for highways, but not for orphans.

The majority of cultural artifacts were destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and teachers were persecuted for having "Western influences."

Maoism brainwashed the population and caused the post-Liberation generation and their children intense suffering. People were sent to jail on the most macabre of pretenses. If you or your father owned a grocery store, you might be sent to 10 years of hard labor because you were perceived as a "capitalist roader."

I can't think of China as one thing. I become enraged at demonstrations of injustice, and as I've outlined, there is plenty of stuff to get mad about in China or in its recent past.

Things have lightened up since the 1980s and the current generation lives a far, far freer life than their parents and grandparents did. But for all of the artists and writers now practicing in China, there is still fear that the Party will repress art that is deemed inappropriate to Party values. People are thrown into prison for writing something unpopular and charges are trumped up. Books are banned. Many writers have left China for the West and published books about China that are banned in China.

There is a bad China and a good China. The good China as I've experienced it is the friendliness of the people. I was very uncomfortable during my three trips to be a Caucasian with Chinese children. A Caucasian with a baby in a Snugli holding hands with two other Chinese children can be perceived as a criticism of China. Yet we were met with nothing but positive reactions wherever we went. And that was true of everyone from bus drivers to restaurant staff to orphanage caregivers and people on the street. If we stood still a crowd would form around us, everyone smiling and showing a thumbs up sign. I can speak a little Chinese and people were thrilled to hear my try out the language. People clammered to speak English with us and take pictures with us. Mothers would tell their children, "Say hello to the foreign Auntie." The people totally won my heart. I've been to a few places around the world, and the Chinese people by far are the most warm and welcoming.

But with all my negative feelings for China, I still raise my daughters to be proud of China and being Chinese. The major way I do this is by going to Chinese school every Saturday from 9:00-12:00. Everyone is Chinese and my daughters have Chinese-American friends.They take an hour of calligraphy every week, and my middle daughter takes guzheng lessons. The guzheng is a chinese harp. Like many Chinese schools in the US, the school was founded by Taiwanese Chinese. We learn the traditional characters still used in Taiwan. Like everything else, Mao reformed the language, simplifying many beautiful charactres, butchering the written language, actually. We get Chinese homework every day. So Chineseness is part of our day every day. Chinese school helps to form pride in their birth country and culture in a big way.We are also very active in an organization called Familes with Children from China where other adoptive familes get together for Chinese New Year. We put on an ambitious Chinese Culture Day every year. My daughters have many friends through this group--girls who have the same history that they do.

It's hard to know what to tell my daughters about how they came to be abandoned. Many adoptive parents tell their children someting to the effect of "Your birth parents loved you very much and created an adoption plan for you so that you would be adopted by loving parents." I would never tell my daughters this because I don't think their birth parents loved them. As girls they were a problem and I think they hardened their hearts and left each one in a public place like a train station; that's where one of my daughters was found. I still don't know what to tell my daughters. Up till now I've told them that it's a mystery why they were abandonned, but that the nannies in the orphanage loved them very much, which is very true. As it is, all three of the girls don't care about their origins.

The girls read a lot of books about the five centuries of Chinese culture, the novels of Amy Tan, and other books I find about life in China or the lives of Chinese immigrants or Chinese-Americans.

Here's a picture of the guzheng and a picture of someone playing it:

Blue Moon, tell us where you've been in China and how you liked it!

Thanks for that interesting post Constance. It's nearly 2 am and I have to go to work at 8...I'll just post a quick response and follow up later.
China...I was fortunate enough to get a job on a 5,000 ton ship being built there, so my perspective is from a shipyard on the bank of the Yangtse River, just across the bridge from Nanjing (in 1999).
It was la life-changing experience and I came home obsessed with China's history, especially the period encompassing the Opium Wars, The Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer uprising.
The shipyard gave us a private audience with the Nanjing Opera to celebrate the completion of the boat...there is an instrument called the erhu...it's almost impossible to hear it without being moved to tears. Must sleep now.
Can't think.

[quote="blue moon"]It was la life-changing experience and I came home obsessed with China's history, especially the period encompassing the Opium Wars, The Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer uprising.

I just finished two books that encompassed those events. Empress Orchid and The Last Empress, both by Anchee Min.

...ah, so it must have been you who posted the dowager empress Cixi in the history thread! I wanted to post the leader of the Taiping's but I couldn't find an image without his name in the properties box...and I thought it was too obscure...so I posted Sun Yat Sen instead.

I'm looking forward to continuing this when I'm conscious.

The River-merchant's Wife: by Li Po (701-762)

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?


At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.


You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

trans. by Ezra Pound, 1915, from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa

The River Merchants Wife. Painting by Mary Wallace.

Another depressing thing about modern China is its controlled birth policy. Starting in 1979, most couples are allowed only one child. Traditional values dictate that families have sons, which, as I wrote above, has resulted in untold numbers of aborted girl fetuses. In the early fervour of planned births, a cadre at peoples' work units kept track of each woman's menstrual period. Couples were informed as to when they had permission to try for a pregnancy. You could only get pregnant when the Party allowed. After the one child was born, women were harrassed into getting sterilized. Women with one child who missed menstrual cycles were forced into taking a pregnancy test and forced to have an abortion if she were pregnant. The totalitarian system has even interferred with people's reproductive rights.

Constance wrote:What do you think about China? I know it's a huge topic, but what comes to mind when you think of China? What's your first reaction? Have you been to China or would you like to go?

First impressions:

I liked the serious approach to food and the absolute absence of waste.
There's a marvellous lack of stupid rules...the type that are 'for our own good', as if we weren't blessed with common sense or the ability to learn from our mistakes. Many of the procedures one must adopt to comply with the rigid dictates of Workplace Health and Safety and such are ludicrous and counter-productive...but we are so used to them now they are the norm. I liked the normlessness of China.
On first impression.

On China by Henry Kissinger – review

Henry Kissinger offers an erudite and elegant insight into the new world superpower

Rana Mitter The Observer, Sunday 15 May 2011


Shanghai, February 1972: President Richard Nixon, centre, dines with Premier Chou En-lai (left) and Shanghai party leader Chang Chun-chiao at the end of his historic visit to China. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The Chinese vice-premier, Wang Qishan, raised eyebrows on his visit to Washington last week when he announced that Americans were a very "simple people". He may well have had Hillary Clinton in his sights, after a prominent interview in which she criticised China for its recent crackdown on dissidents. One Chinese commentator came up with a tortured explanation as to why this Sino-US spat was actually a good thing: when nations know each other better, he suggested, they feel less need to be polite and can say what they really think.


On China by Henry Kissinger

Well, perhaps. But if there is one narrative that marks the global society of the early 21st century, then it is the increasing unwillingness of Washington and Beijing to understand each other's viewpoints. Although millions of westerners visit China each year, the history and motivations of the regime in Beijing and the 1.3 billion people that it rules remain a source of deep mystery to the west in a way that is not true for India, the other Asian giant. Bestselling books tend to fuel the disorientation rather than reduce it, whether they are airport-style business manuals on how not to lose your shirt or analyses that predict either imminent global takeover by the Middle Kingdom or its sudden implosion.

This makes former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's On China an unusual and valuable book. Of all the westerners who shaped the post-second world war world – and there is little doubt that he did – he is one of the very few who made the American relationship with China the key axis for his world view. This is all the more remarkable since Kissinger's realpolitik also profoundly shaped American relations with Europe, the Middle East, and south-east Asia. Yet at four decades' distance, it is the approach to China in 1971 and 1972 that stands out as the historically crucial moment.

Historians would now argue that the Nixon visit to China in 1972 did not come out of the blue. During the 1960s, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations discussed a warming of relations with China, but were frustrated by Chinese hostility, culminating in the cultural revolution, when it was hard to find anyone to pick up the phone in Beijing. Yet the decision of a Republican administration to reach out to an ideologically radical and xenophobic communist regime in the midst of a vicious land war in Asia still seems a bold one and, unlike many policy decisions of the cold war, one that has stood the test of time.

The book is really two distinct narratives built into one. The first is a long-range sweep through Chinese history, from the very earliest days to the present. For the most part, this is elite history, where statesmen do deals with other statesmen. Yet there are human touches that reveal something of the writer. One of the commonest comparisons to Kissinger is the 19th-century statesman Metternich, the pin-up for pragmatic diplomacy. Here, Kissinger implies an interesting alternative comparison with his pen-portrait of Li Hongzhang, the Chinese foreign minister of the late 19th century. Li had to make various compromises on Chinese sovereignty, including cession of railway rights to Russia, which led to his being reviled by his contemporaries. A century later, Li's reputation is still controversial in China, but he is widely regarded as an original thinker who played a difficult hand with skill. The parallel does not need to be laboured. And one imagines it gave Kissinger some pleasure to cite a figure few have heard of in the west, but who is known to every educated Chinese person.

The historical merges into the personal in the early 1970s, when Kissinger, as national security adviser, becomes a central figure in the narrative during the secret approach to Mao's China. Inevitably, the sections many will turn to first are those where Kissinger reveals the details of his conversations with top Chinese leaders from Mao to Jiang Zemin. The contours of the story are familiar, but the judgments on figures who have passed into history still have freshness because they come from the last surviving top-level figure who was at the 1971 meeting. "Mao dominated any gathering, [premier] Zhou [Enlai] suffused it," he notes. "Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating." He also gives us details of the one occasion when he (and possibly any westerner) saw the unflappable Zhou Enlai lose his temper: when Kissinger suggested that Chinese Marxism had adapted the tenets of traditional Confucianism. Zhou may have been particularly incensed since the insight was in many ways quite accurate.

One aspect of Chinese politics that Kissinger stresses is the tendency of leaders to make statements and let listeners draw their own inferences and that is a technique that he employs throughout the book. He notes that some observers consider Mao's cruelty a price worth paying for the restoration of China as a major power, whereas others believe that his crimes outweigh his contribution.

But Kissinger's view is discernible only where he hints that a "recent biography" of Mao (presumably Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story) is interesting but "one-sided." After all, it is a Chinese tradition that senior mandarins make their views known by praise or condemnation of a piece of literature; it was a favourite tactic of Mao's.

Nixon's role also comes in for scrutiny by his former secretary of state. Despite his fondness for "vagueness and ambiguity", among the 10 presidents whom Kissinger has known, Nixon "had a unique grasp of long-term international trends". It is hard not to see there yet another subtle criticism of more recent administrations which have failed to consider the impact of their policies in the longer term, particularly in the Middle East.

The final part of the book has a distinctly elegiac feel, as if Kissinger is worried that the rise of a new assertive nationalism in China along with "yellow peril" populist rhetoric in the US may undo the work that came from that secret visit to Beijing in 1971. His prescription – that the west should hold to its own values on questions of human rights while seeking to understand the historical context in which China has come to prominence – is sensible. But policymakers in Washington and Beijing seem less enthusiastic about nuance than their predecessors. The hints and aphorisms batted between Zhou and Kissinger have given way to a more zero-sum rhetoric.

Henry Kissinger will always remain a controversial historical figure. But this elegantly written and erudite book reminds us that on one of the biggest questions of the post-second world war world his judgment was right, and showed a long-term vision that few politicians of any country could match today. Unless, of course, Hillary Clinton is even now on a secret mission to Tehran.

Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China, University of Oxford

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

I'd love to go to China on a long vacation.

I'd love to go to China on a long vacation.

A woman I work with has 4 adopted Chinese daughters. She is, and always has been, a single mom. The girls are now 16, 14, 12, and 8. They are all going to China this summer to visit the daughters' birth towns.

I don't think there is anything like Chinese School around here, this is a pretty small town. I do know that earlier this year when the family visited Chinatown in Chicago the girls were pretty excited to be just another face in the crowd.

I travelled overland from Hong Kong to Beijing twice, within the space of two months, in 1996. I don't know what freedom of travel is like over there now, but at the time, only a handful of Westerners had visited some of the jaw-dropping landscapes, and sprawling industrial cities I journeyed through. Every town seemed to specialise in one thing. There was one town that just seemed to sell beds. Some of the driving defied belief. I remember a quadruple overtake that almost resulted in a head-on with our convoy. The outside driver- who had his keys seized by our government escort, and was left standing bemused at the roadside- couldn't seem to understand what he had done wrong. Another time, crossing the Yangtse at around 3am, in the fog, three huge lorries loomed into sight, driving towards us on the wrong side of the carriageway. Scary journey. At night, I had to navigate our non-english speaking Chinese driver by the light of a torch on a headband. We would ride into towns, where our head honcho man, The Brigadier, as I called him, would commandeer a kitchen cum shack restaurant, and get the owners to rustle up bowls of noodle soup on the spot. One regret is not getting up, late at night, in one city, and taking my camera round the corner to the station, where you could hear all these steam trains, shunting in and out. When we got to Beijing, there was a funky little bar across from our hotel, called Maggie's Farm (thankyou Bob, I'm working on another biography), which became our watering hole de choix. My favourite moment of all was borrowing a megaphone from The Brigadier, who thankfully spoke no English, and issuing a robotically clipped 'Vote Conservative' rallying cry (never having voted Conservative in my life) to the masses, as we rode into Tianamen Square.

One aspect of Chinese politics that Kissinger stresses is the tendency of leaders to make statements and let listeners draw their own inferences and that is a technique that he employs throughout the book. He notes that some observers consider Mao's cruelty a price worth paying for the restoration of China as a major power, whereas others believe that his crimes outweigh his contribution.

But Kissinger's view is discernible only where he hints that a "recent biography" of Mao (presumably Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story) is interesting but "one-sided." After all, it is a Chinese tradition that senior mandarins make their views known by praise or condemnation of a piece of literature; it was a favourite tactic of Mao's.

It's sickening to hear that "some observers consider Mao's cruelty a price worth paying for the restoration of china as a major power." I wish Kissinger had said who some of these observers are.Mao was a murder and the worst devil the world has ever known. Twenty to forty million people died in the man-made famine of 1960-63. Thirty million people died in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. There are no two sides to the argument. Jung Chang uses exhaustive historical data to detail her portrayal of Mao. Her bibliography is as long as a book. It's shocking to hear Kissinger say that her book is one-sided.

I read a long excerpt of Kissinger's book in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and found it very self-centered and turgid. But I don't want to judge the book on these few impressions. I'll read the book.

tigerlily wrote:A woman I work with has 4 adopted Chinese daughters. She is, and always has been, a single mom. The girls are now 16, 14, 12, and 8. They are all going to China this summer to visit the daughters' birth towns.

I don't think there is anything like Chinese School around here, this is a pretty small town. I do know that earlier this year when the family visited Chinatown in Chicago the girls were pretty excited to be just another face in the crowd.

She must be an amazing woman to have adopted 4 children on her own. Singles aren't allowed to adopt anymore; China made it's adoption laws stricter a few years ago, claiming that there are fewer children to adopt. That is a ludigrous thing to say.

But I must say, the first thing I thought when hearing about your friend is that she must make a ton of money to adopt 4 girls and to afford to take them all back to China this summer.

What is her profession?

Constance wrote:

tigerlily wrote:A woman I work with has 4 adopted Chinese daughters. She is, and always has been, a single mom. The girls are now 16, 14, 12, and 8. They are all going to China this summer to visit the daughters' birth towns.

I don't think there is anything like Chinese School around here, this is a pretty small town. I do know that earlier this year when the family visited Chinatown in Chicago the girls were pretty excited to be just another face in the crowd.

She must be an amazing woman to have adopted 4 children on her own. Singles aren't allowed to adopt anymore; China made it's adoption laws stricter a few years ago, claiming that there are fewer children to adopt. That is a ludigrous thing to say.

But I must say, the first thing I thought when hearing about your friend is that she must make a ton of money to adopt 4 girls and to afford to take them all back to China this summer.

What is her profession?

She really is pretty amazing....takes everything in stride.

She's a librarian and makes decent money, but there's also an inheritance and wise investing involved.

She took her oldest daughter with her to China when she picked up the youngest. All the girls attended (or still do attend) private Catholic elementary school. Two years ago she built a new 5 bedroom house.

You would never know she has this kind of money....a very down to earth woman, from a large farm family.

I'd love to meet her and have our kids get together.

We took Madeleine back to China when we adopted Elisabeth, and we took both Madeleine and Elisabeth back with us when we adopted Julia.(No wonder we have so little savings.) It was good for the girls to see how tenderly the Chinense caregivers took care of the babies and to see how nice and smooth the process was. And it was motivating for them to hear me get around speaking basic Chinese. They came home ready to plunge back into Chinese school. My husband gets a bad cold everytime we go to China, and he would rest up in the hotel with the baby while the older girls went out with me in taxis to explore the different places we went to.

Tell your friend that she has a fan in New York!

Constance wrote:
Tell your friend that she has a fan in New York!

I sent you a PM

Read this about child traffiking. The last line says that the police can seize the baby--take the child away from its parents--if the parents have broken a marriage law or exceeded the one-child policy.


Only in China...

In the name of China's one-child policy, officials in Hunan Province have been seizing children and using adoption fees to bolster tax revenue.
A new report from Caixin related the rise in forced adoption to the abolition of agricultural taxes in 2006, which decimated provincial budgets. In response, family planning fees spiked, from 3,000 yuan per child to more than 10,000. Parents who can't pay the fee have their children taken and given to orphanages.
Here's a vivid account of the travesty from the LA Times:
The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby."
Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared ...
"I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan.
The orphanage then posts a notice in the daily newspaper for 60 days. When the child is left unclaimed, the parents unable to read the announcement or pay the fines, the orphanage labels the baby an orphan, records its arrival date as the birthday, and gives each child a new name.
From there, with the help of document forgers and complicit authorities, more than 100,000 Chinese children were adopted by families around the world — the largest portion going to the U.S.— until last year.
Chinese orphanages receive about $3,000 apiece for the "orphans". Almost 50,000 Chinese infants have been adopted by American families since 2000 at a cost of between $20,000 to 25,000 per child.
10 years after implementing its one-child policy, the Chinese government passed a 1992 law allowing international adoptions.
Children can be seized if they are born to unmarried couples, to parents whose marriage has not been officially recognized, if the parents have exceeded quotas, or if a child is adopted without meeting specific requirements.

Uzi wrote:
FungalFaCT : 7% of sino government revenue comes from Tobacco Monopoly Administration AKA China Tobacco Corp.

I'm not surprised, given the size of those cigarettes.

Xinhua/Shanghai Daily | 2011-4-28


Family planning policy stays firm


CHINA will maintain the strict family planning policy it imposed a generation ago to keep the birth rate low and the economy growing, President Hu Jintao said in remarks before the release of census data.

China has the world's largest population and credits its family planning policy introduced in 1980 with preventing 400 million additional births.

The population is now more than 1.3 billion. Data on the first census in 10 years will be made public today.

Hu told top state leaders at a group study of the Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee on Tuesday that the policy - which limits most urban couples to one child and rural families to two - should be maintained and improved. But no birth rate target or other specific details were given.

Hu said China is a big developing country with a population of more than 1.3 billion, which is a fundamental reality that should be kept in mind when making decisions and taking actions.

There has been growing speculation among Chinese media, experts and the public about whether the government would relax the family planning policy soon, allowing more people to have two children.

The family planning policy has curbed China's population growth but brought new problems, such as an expanding elderly population that demographers say will be increasingly hard to support as the young labor force shrinks.

Hu said that social security and services for the elderly should be improved and he called on officials to formulate strategies to cope with the aging population.

The president also called for efforts in building China into a country strong in human resources.

The one-child policy is blamed by some for the country's skewed sex ratio. Some families with a strong preference for boys sometimes resort to aborting female fetuses. Demographers worry the imbalance will make it hard for men to find wives.

The male-female ratio at birth in China is about 119 males to 100 females, with the gap as high as 130 males for every 100 females in some provinces. In industrialized countries, the ratio is 107 to 100.

Problems concerning the sex ratio should be addressed, and gender equity efforts enhanced, Hu said.

Government statistics showed China recorded 12.13 births per thousand people in 2009, comparable to birth rates in the United Kingdom, Australia and Denmark.

It is above the very low birth rates of around 7 or 8 per thousand found in countries such as Japan and Italy.

But it is well below the 23 births per thousand that the United Nations reports for India, which is expected to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2025.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/nsp/National/2011/04/28/Family%2Bplanning%2Bpolicy%2Bstays%2Bfirm/

They take being left standing at the altar seriously, over there. Thankfully, the bride that never was, was hauled back in ok.

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung – review

Jonathan Fenby enjoys a dystopian portrait of the world's most deceitful superpower

Jonathan Fenby The Observer, Sunday 24 July 2011


A boy waves a Chinese flag at a celebration of the Communist party's 90th anniversary in Tiananmen Square, June 2011. Photograph: AP

The problem with writing novels set in the near future is that time catches up with you. The Fat Years, set in a China of 2011, appeared in Hong Kong in 2009. At first glance, it might seem that history has overtaken Chan Koonchung's book, since the terrible events it describes have not come to pass. But in fact, the book's central theme remains as valid as when Chan wrote it. Despite being officially banned, the novel has enjoyed a considerable underground audience in mainland China, even becoming a smart item for society hostesses to give to guests, as Julia Lovell notes in her illuminating preface.


The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

The Fat Years remains valid because it is not simply a "what might happen" exercise in futurism. Its central conceit – that collective amnesia overtakes the entire country – is an all-encompassing metaphor for today's looming superpower and the question that lies behind its material renaissance since the 1980s – namely, whether a booming economy and an increasingly free individual society can be contained within the political straitjacket of a one-party system that seeks to retain all the levers of power for itself.

The novel's starting point is that a month has gone missing from the official record and from popular memory in a China which bestrides the globe economically, right down to owning Starbucks. Something terrible took place during the vanished month, but the regime, through nefarious means that are only revealed at the end of the novel, has managed to effect a state of near total forgetfulness.

The central character, Old Chen, sets out to find what happened and to understand why everybody is so extraordinarily happy, as he himself is at the start of the book, living in Happiness Village Number Two, and content in the realisation that China has enjoyed continuing growth and ever greater social harmony while the west has wilted after the economic tsunami of 2008.

The person who sets him on this quest is an old flame he meets by chance, Little Xi, an online dissident with an obnoxious Party-lining son. They join with others who question the country's euphoric condition. They meet characters who have made it materially and those who have suffered – on the one side, a real estate tycoon, a jetsetting political adviser and a high-price prostitute; on the other, an underground Christian and a former slave worker. To conclude their investigation, they kidnap a senior official and he spills the beans as to what lies behind the "fat years".

The theme of collective memory loss is particularly apposite in a country where the past is manipulated by those in power and where no public discussion of the official version of, say, the events of 1989 is permitted. Whether a nation can progress without confronting its own past is a question that hovers over the country, which again adds to the novel's pertinence.

Sitting in the comfortable west, it is easy for critics of China to be censorious about the way so many people accept the rush for wealth accumulation and close an eye to the regime's political record and its human rights abuses. But the crude fact is that, after a terrible century and a quarter up to 1978, in which China went through the worst protracted experience of any nation in history, the present era may, indeed, seem like the "fat years".

To touch on so many issues, either directly or by implication, in such a compelling narrative is a triumph, abetted by an excellent translation by Michael Duke. One can only hope that Chan, who was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, continues to write about the China of today from his current vantage point in Beijing. That will, in its way, be a test of whether the warnings of The Fat Years come true. We can only hope not.


Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of Modern China, is working on a book on contemporary China, to be published next

Exiled author Ma Jian banned from visiting China

Writer warns of increasingly repressive political regime after he is stopped from entering Chinese mainland from Hong Kong

Tania Branigan in Beijing guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011 12.44 BST


Chinese author Ma Jian was barred from entering mainland China during a recent visit to Hong Kong. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

One of China's most acclaimed authors, who is now a British citizen, has warned that its "increasingly harsh" political climate has echoes of the Cultural Revolution after authorities barred him from entering the mainland.

Ma Jian, author of Red Dust and Beijing Coma, was prevented from crossing the border from Hong Kong on Saturday. He had previously returned hundreds of times since leaving China in 1986. Officials have given him no reason for the ban or any indication of how long it will last.

"The fact that I have been denied entry is an indication of how repressive the regime has become," said Ma. "It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.

"I suspected that my trip to Beijing this summer might be problematic because of the increasingly harsh political climate in China. And sure enough, for the first time in my life, I have been denied entry."

The 58-year-old said this clampdown felt different to others he had witnessed over the last three decades, and suggested that a lack of international reaction was partially responsible.

Citing the imprisonment of Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the two-month detention of Ai Weiwei, he warned: "There are echoes of the Cultural Revolution, when no sounds could be heard other than the deafening voice of the Communist party. This current clampdown began with the Beijing Olympics. The government discovered that they could suppress all forms of dissent, and still receive the approbation of the international community."

Ma is a permanent resident of Hong Kong, having moved there shortly before his first book was denounced by the Chinese authorities in 1987. He left for the UK when Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 and lives in London with his partner and translator Flora Drew and their children.

Although his works are banned on the mainland he has been able to return regularly, but said his movements are closely monitored.

Ma added: "When I travelled through the Chinese countryside while researching the book I've just finished, almost every friend I stayed with along my route was later questioned by the police."

He was also summoned to see state security officers while visiting Beijing in 2008. They said they were watching him closely but that as long as he stayed away from politically sensitive people such as Liu Xiaobo, and did not contact the media while on the mainland, he could return whenever he wished.

Ma said he had been in Hong Kong for a book fair last week and wanted to buy books in Shenzhen before flying back to London. He now fears he will be unable to make a long planned trip to Beijing next week with his family. His 88-year-old mother is in frail health and has yet to meet his youngest children.

"Many people have suggested that the clampdown is connected with an internal jostling for power ahead of the change in government leadership next year, but I think something more fundamental is going on, something relating to the nature of the Communist party itself and the totalitarian regime's inability to adapt to modernity and to respond to natural yearnings for free expression," he said.

"My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them."

I've read two of his books. Highly recommended.