Yan Lianke’s Novel Assesses the Moral Cost of China’s Growth

By JIAYANG FAN

Yan Lianke 

THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES
By Yan Lianke
Translated by Carlos Rojas
457 pp. Grove Press. $26.

Here are four scenarios to test one’s ability to differentiate between fact and fiction in modern China: (1) Elderly people hastily kill themselves so that they will be buried traditionally, in tombs, before a cremation law takes effect. 

(2) Thousands of dead pigs float down the river of a major metropolis that supplies drinking water to 26 million residents. 

(3) A village of several hundred inhabitants swells into a city of 20 million, its growth fueled by prostitution and corruption. 

(4) All three story lines are used as inspiration by a Communist Party propagandist-turned-novelist who is both celebrated and censored by a country that can’t make up its mind on whether he should be exalted or exiled.
If all four scenarios seem fantastical, Yan Lianke, the propagandist-turned-writer, will have succeeded in realizing a central theme of “The Explosion Chronicles,” a novel premised on No. 3: that what Yan calls the “incomprehensible absurdity” of contemporary China — elderly people in the city of Anxing reportedly did kill themselves to avoid cremation; thousands of dead pigs did float down the Huangpu River — renders the boundary between reality and fantasy virtually indistinguishable. 

Stylistically, this is not new terrain for Yan, whose fiction has lampooned some of the darkest moments in Chinese history, including the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the 1990s AIDS scandal in his home province of Henan. 

In this latest work, however, Yan shifts his irreverent gaze from the past to the present and toward projections of the future, taking stock of China’s vertiginous economic rise and the astonishing dissolution of its collective social conscience.

“The Explosion Chronicles” traces the ascent of a “fallen fruit” village named Explosion to a city on par with Shanghai and Beijing. 

The levers of power rest within the Kong family (incidentally, also the surname of Confucius), which divvies up political, economic and military might among four brothers. 

Prosperity is the official religion, while prostitution and larceny are among the founding industries. Bribery, fraud and vote-rigging are so common and lucrative that their impropriety is efficiently buried under heaps of money; appropriately, Explosion is soon celebrated for holding the first democratic elections since the founding of the People’s Republic.
The Kongs, who treat Explosion like a familial plot of land to be irrigated with Deng-era watchwords — economic “development zone”; “central policy directives”; Reform and Opening Up campaign — do not only want to install a new dynasty. 

By the time Explosion has been promoted from town to county, the rulers view themselves as gods, and in magic-realist fashion, the moral chaos is horrifyingly reflected in the dysfunction of nature. 

A member of the Kong clan can literally make snow fall from the sky with one document and get flowers to bloom from his pen tip. 

The climate acquiesces to the demands of urban expectation, and everything from squirrels to crickets to shrubbery is reduced to a subject of the Kong empire.
As with Yan’s previous novels, the formal inventiveness of “The Explosion Chronicles” is impressive and its fictional universe vividly drawn. 

But one cannot help wishing it were less an operatic allegory of political principles and more a story, animated by fallible protagonists who are not entirely devoid of moral ambivalence. 

In an Op-Ed for The New York Times in 2014, Yan lamented the costs of China’s economic development. 

“No one can tell us what price should be paid for human feelings, human nature and human dignity,” he wrote. 

“What is the price for abandoning the ideals of democracy, freedom, law and morality?” 

These are grim but urgent questions that affect the varied lives of 1.4 billion. 

I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth, to imagine the answers.