China Dream

How China's Belt And Road Became A Global Trail Of Trouble
By Wade Shepard

Sri Lanka's most corrupted President Mahinda Rajapaksa Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Chinese Ambassador to Sri Lanka Cheng Xueyuan and attendees look at a proposed construction model of Port City during an event to officially declare the 269 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea for the project as part of the capital Colombo on December 7, 2019.

China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI), a network of enhanced overland and maritime trade routes better linking China with Asia, Europe and Africa began in 2013 with much fanfare and hope. Upwards of a trillion dollars were being put on the table to boost economic development in globalization’s final frontiers, Asia and Africa’s infrastructure gap was to be lessened, and the world’s second largest economy was taking more of an active role in international affairs with the prospect of creating a true multi-polar global power structure. 

With catchphrases like “a rising tide lifts all ships,” China stepped beyond its borders to an extent that hasn’t been seen for centuries—perhaps ever—and was welcomed by many emerging markets with open arms.
But today, nearly seven years since the Belt and Road began, the story is much different, as Chinese investment has become a euphemism for wasteful spending, environmental destruction and untenable debt. 

Many major projects are currently strewn around the world in half-finished disrepair and the opportunities that were sold to local populations rarely materialized. 

All up and down the Belt and Road, projects have been marred by delays, financial implosions and violent outpourings of negative public sentiment.
In the initial stages of the Belt and Road, it seemed as if China was trying to rewrite the book on international development. 

The projects were bigger, more costly, and riskier than what the world was used to seeing, which created a buzz and sense of excitement: could China step up onto the global stage and show us how it’s done? 

While the news tickers sparkled with headlines of multi-billion dollar deals, big moves, and action along the Belt and Road, a broader view would have shown that a large portion of these deals were being made with countries that had credit ratings classified as “junk.” 

Making big deals with countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia showed the initial propensity of the Belt and Road to shoot for quantity over quality, expediency over transparency—and the reactions from this strategy was quickly felt across the entire network.
It was in Sri Lanka that the deficiencies of China’s international development activities were first revealed globally. 

China partnered with Sri Lanka’s most corrupted president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who now faces allegations of financial irregularities, to build a series of infrastructure mega-projects in Hambantota, a vastly undeveloped region on the island nation’s southern coast. 

To start, the plan called for a new deep sea port, an airport, a stadium, a giant conference center and many miles of new roadways. 

These projects were mostly funded with loans from China, which a few years later Sri Lanka struggled to pay back, as the country sunk into a debt trap of its own making.
China eventually seized a 70% share of the deep sea port at Hambantota for 99 years for $1.12 billion. 

While this at first appeared to be a debt-for-equity swap, news later came out that Sri Lanka actually used the money to beef up its foreign reserves and make some other foreign debt repayments to save itself from economic collapse. 

However, the optics on the situation were entirely unhelpful, with headlines like “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port” echoed across media sources around the world as the “Chinese debt trap diplomacy” theory was born.
The Hambantota fiasco put a black mark on the Belt and Road’s financing strategies and served as a warning for emerging markets looking to make similar deals with China. 

Bangladesh, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sierra Leone have all subsequently decided to cancel or downsize some of their Belt and Road projects over concerns of ending up like Sri Lanka. 

China’s bags of money, which emerging markets were ogling over in the early days of the Belt and Road, seem to have lost a touch of their luster.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping speaks with Sri Lanka's most corrupted President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

“As Chinese companies push deeper into emerging markets, inadequate enforcement and poor business practices are turning the BRI into a global trail of trouble,” wrote Jonathan Hillman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“A long list of Chinese companies have been debarred from the World Bank and other multilateral development banks for fraud and corruption, which covers everything from inflating costs to giving bribes.”
When the Belt and Road was first announced, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak welcomed the initiative, and China quickly became the top source of FDI in Malaysia. 

According to the World Bank, between 2010 and 2016 nearly $36 billion was pumped into Malaysia by Chinese state-owned firms. 

Multiple big ticket infrastructure projects—including the East Coast Rail Link project and a massive port city called Melaka Gateway—were started, Chinese firms bought up multiple Malaysian ports, and bonafide mega-projects, such as the $100 billion, 250,000+ person Forest City, were being built with Chinese direction and financial backing.
Then came the problems. 

News of the 1MDB and other scandals connected with the prime minister came out, as it was discovered that over $7.5 billion of government money had disappeared. 

Via Belt and Road projects, China had a role in trying to help the embattled prime minister cover evidence of financial irregularities by artificially inflating the costs of infrastructure projects so the excess could be available for other uses. 

This favor came with a catch, however, as Malaysia was to give Chinese companies big stakes in national railway and pipeline projects and permission for the Chinese navy to use two Malaysian ports. 

This deal didn’t come to pass, but it yet again cast the Belt and Road in a dubious light.
There are many other examples of parties from China allegations of corruption up and down the Belt and Road. 

Bangladesh shut down a highway project that was supposed to have been built by the China Harbour Engineering Company due to the company reputedly offering a Bangladeshi official a bribe, Chinese development funds were reportedly allocated for Rajapaksa’s ill-fated reelection campaign, Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE have been probed for wrongdoing in numerous BRI countries, and the U.S. arrested the emissary of China’s CEFC Energy Company for illicit payments to officials in Chad and Uganda. 

A 2017 McKinsey survey found that between 60% to 80% of Chinese companies in Africa admitted to paying bribes and, almost needless to say, in the latest Transparency International Bribe Payers Index, Chinese firms scored second to last.At this point, it is clear that the BRI does not keep good company. 

In addition to most Belt and Road countries having poor debt ratings, they also tend not to fare so well in international corruption indexes. 

According to the TRACE Bribery Risk Matrix, 10 Belt and Road countries were deemed to be among the countries most at risk to bribery.
While the lack of transparency and oversight as to what China is doing abroad was a boon in the early days of the Belt and Road, the initiative has lost support amid the scandals, debt traps and failed projects that have emerged in recent years. 

Countries along the corridors are now operating with far more caution and scrutiny, pumping the breaks on many projects and potentially setting the BRI back for years to come.

'Truth is Under Threat.'

Ten Questions for Chinese Dissident Author Ma Jian
BY AMY GUNIA

Ma Jian, writer, known as the Chinese Solzhenitsyn at the Oxford Literary Festival 2019 in Oxford, England on April 5, 2019.

Ma Jian has a flair for the provocative. 

In 2012, the London Book Fair partnered with the all-powerful Chinese state agency responsible for regulating publications and the Internet—the General Administration for Press and Publication. 

In protest, the author smeared an X across his face in red paint. 

He then attempted to hand a copy of a book he had written, its cover also marked with a red X, to the head of the agency, who was attending the fair. 

The book was about one of China’s most taboo topics—the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.
Ma had reason to be angry: his books have been banned in his homeland for the last 30 years, and he has not been allowed to return to China for the last few years as the country’s dictator, Xi Jinping, has initiated a widespread crackdown on dissent.
The author was born in the Chinese city of Qingdao in 1953. 

He started his career on a more traditional path, at a petrochemical plant in Beijing, before deciding to become a photojournalist. 

In the 1980s, he began hanging out in the Chinese capital’s underground literary and art scene and took up painting again—a childhood love that was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. 

He also started writing. 

His first book, 1988’s Stick Out Your Tongue, inspired by his travels in Tibet, caught the attention of the country’s censors, and all copies were destroyed. 

Since then, none of his books have been allowed to be published in China.
His latest work is, without a doubt, a political statement. 

China Dream—a phrase borrowed directly from Xi who commonly uses it to describe a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—is a scathing, dystopian novel that follows a fictional Chinese provincial leader as he works to replace people’s dreams with government propaganda.
But Ma says that he refuses to stand down. 

“I have never allowed myself to not write something for fear of consequences; that would be the death of literature in my mind,” Ma told TIME.
China Dream has already been released in the U.K., where he now lives with his wife and children, and it will be available in the U.S. on May 7.
Here’s what the writer-in-exile had to say about the new title and what is happening in China today.

Tell us about your new book.
China Dream was inspired by the idea that China was shrouded in a veil of lies. 

It was a strong desire to expose these lies and shine a light on them that drove me to write the book. 

I wanted to reveal the darkness that lies at the core of Xi Jinping’s sunny utopia.

Did you draw on inspiration from your own life for the book?
[The book’s main character] Ma Daode’s task is not only to suppress memories of the past but also to control speech in the present. 

My whole life has been affected by the [Chinese government’s] desire to clampdown on personal liberties and freedom of speech. 

When I was living in China in the 1980s I was continually being detained, arrested for things I said, or paintings I created. 

This has continued today where my books are still banned and I am forced to live in exile.

“China Dream” is a phrase commonly used by Xi Jinping and in Chinese propaganda. Why did you chose to call the book that?
When Xi Jinping rose to power and announced his China Dream of national resurgence, and made this the bedrock of his rule, I at once saw it as a crime. 

It is criminal for a leader to impose a dream on a nation. 

Dreams are an expression of the most unfettered realm of the human spirit.

What is your dream for China?
My dream for China is that it will become a country that respects freedom of speech, where independent thought prospers. 

This, of course, would be a time when a totalitarian regime no longer exists, where people are free to determine their own life paths and to dream their own dreams. 

It will be a country that gives dignity to every individual life, where people feel safe in their own homes, and feel that they can express their thoughts freely that go against official ideology without fear of arrest or suppression.

How do you stay attuned to what is going in China while living outside of it?
In fact, I feel more attuned to what is going on in China living in London, more connected than I did in China when my movements were monitored, when I was forbidden to meet with sensitive people, where information was blocked by the firewall. 

Here I can know real-time, through the internet, what is happening. 

Information that is restricted in China, I have full access to.

What do you want China’s youth, who have not been able to learn about what happened in Tiananmen, to know about the massacre?
My hope is that the young people of today will have an opportunity to re-connect with their own history that has been denied them. 

They need to learn the lessons of those crucial years, because the situation [in China] today is more dangerous than it has been in many decades.

Is the Chinese government succeeding in its efforts to enforce censorship?
At the moment, it looks like their system of censorship is succeeding in maintaining the Communist Party’s barbaric rule. 

The party has huge amounts of money, it has an army of censors.

What do you hope readers will learn from reading your book?
We are now in a state of turmoil, in a state of flux, where there is a loss of faith in all leaders, where truth is under threat. 

I hope that this book can show that is vital that individuals never give up asking questions. 

If you stop reflecting on the past, if you don’t question what is fed to you, if you don’t question the motives of the people who are leading you, we will all share a common fate, and that is that we will all be controlled by people that are more stupid and evil and than us.

Did any recent events in particular prompt you to start writing the book?
I only have to read the news from China; every day there is something that will fill me with rage. 

But perhaps one of the sparks for writing of this particular book was attending the London Book Fair where China was the guest of honor.

Here in the country where I had sought refuge, where I thought that the freedom of expression was one of the founding values, I saw how the red carpet was rolled out for the Chinese censors-in-chief.

A talk you were scheduled to give in Hong Kong last year was suddenly cancelled (before being re-instated). The motivation was political. Will China Dream be published in Hong Kong?
Until now, all of my books have been published in Hong Kong in the Chinese language, but the spread of the Communist party’s control beyond its borders means that no Hong Kong publisher would dare to publish this book.
Originally there was one publisher who was willing to publish it in Hong Kong, we got quite far in the process—it had been edited and the cover had been approved. 

Suddenly they said they were not going to go ahead with it, and they did not give me a clear reason. 

I can only assume that they received a message from above or they realized themselves that it could be too dangerous and they could face possible arrest as other publishers have in Hong Kong.

China Dream by Ma Jian – stinging satire from a novelist in exile

Buried dreams and past betrayals erupt into the present moment, in a feverish vision of contemporary Chinese society

By Madeleine Thien

Bleakly funny … Ma Jian. 
On the cover of Ma Jian’s new novel, an ancient tree is exploding in all directions, its branches seeming to lash out at the heavens. 

Designed by another exile from China, artist Ai Weiwei, the image is a haunting doorway into China Dream, a biting and humane novel of stunning concision in which buried dreams and past betrayals erupt into the present moment.
In 2012, Xi Jinping used the phrase the Chinese Dream (zhōngguó mèng) to describe “the great rejuvenation” of the nation. 

A national solidarity movement, the Chinese Dream attempts to fuse cultural pride and individual self-realisation with the country’s economic growth and rising influence. 

The slogan is everywhere, on billboards, in speeches and advertisements, and mixes patriotism and self-help with the “twin goals of reclaiming national pride and achieving personal wellbeing”.
Ma was born in 1953, the same year as Xi Jinping. 

Both men witnessed the shaming, exile and loss of family members during Mao Zedong’s political campaigns. 

In 1983, Ma himself was arrested for the crime of spiritual pollution; he chronicled his exile to the most remote regions of the country in Red Dust, an unforgettable memoir of post-Mao China. 

Today, the lives of Ma and Xi remain strikingly at odds. 

In 2018, Xi ended term limits on the presidency, thus opening the door to his indefinite rule. 

Ma, barred from even entering China, has mischievously stolen Xi’s signature slogan.
China Dream’s antihero, Ma Daode, is vice-chair of the local writers’ association and director of the newly created China Dream Bureau, dedicated to ensuring that the Chinese Dream enters “the brain of every resident of Ziyang City”. 

Ma Daode is clever and influential: he has stashed mooncakes filled with little gold bars in his attic, and is juggling so many lovers that he keeps a “Fragrant Beauties Register”; one lover calls him Mr Dirty Dream. 

But his hard-won success is being undermined by terrifying slivers of memory. 

He places his hopes in an imagined “China Dream Device” which, if implanted, would make all dreams – first and foremost his own – comply with Xi’s vision and allow him to wake up inside “a life of unbridled joy”.
Bleakly funny, incisive, stinging and – in its most destabilising passages – gut-wrenching, China Dream, brilliantly translated by Flora Drew, is set at a time when reality and dystopia have begun to bleed into one another. 

In the kaleidoscope of Ma Daode’s thoughts, different times converge; dream locations are overlaid on the sites of nightmares. 

A wild grove outside Ziyang City is, in the present, a demolition site making ready for the very expensive Yaobang Industrial Park; in the 1990s, a secret cemetery; in 1968, the mass grave for hundreds of Red Guards killed during internecine warfare. 

It is also the deserted place where Ma Daode buried his parents, who killed themselves in 1966, during the first year of the Cultural Revolution, after being mercilessly beaten by Red Guards. 

In the novel, all times come to us in the present tense. 

Ai Weiwei’s ancient tree on the cover is, it appears, detonating its branches into the now.
Even an orgy can’t help the beleaguered Ma Daode stay in the moment. 

In a comic passage that grows increasingly surreal and moving, he entertains three women in a room decorated to resemble Chairman Mao’s private railway car. 

As Cultural Revolution songs, popular once more, ring out from the karaoke machine, Ma Daode recites Song dynasty poetry. 

On a TV screen, the 2013 sentencing of Bo Xilai for corruption and abuse of power plays out on the evening news. 

One of the women laughs when Ma Daode complains that her Red Guard costume is inauthentic, replying: “Our boss told us we are all the heirs of Communism.” 

His body, heart and mind are divided into so many eras and conflicting desires, it’s no wonder he believes that the cure is China Dream Soup, a broth of eternal forgetting he will obtain from a qigong healer and market to the world. 

“But what I want to forget the most,” he says, “is my shameful betrayal of my father. When I see him again, I will fall to my knees and beg for his forgiveness.” 

But how can Ma Daode erase his remorse at responsibility for his parents’ deaths without also consigning every memory of them to oblivion?

Xi Jinping promotes ‘the dream’ on a billboard in China’s northern Hebei province. 

Over the 40 years of his career, Ma has ingeniously chronicled a China struggling both to change and to remember. 

Beijing Coma, his unparalleled novel of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, is a classic work, as is The Dark Road, the macabre, spellbinding story of a mother’s determined journey to outwit the one-child policy. 

By rights, Ma should be recognised as one of China’s greatest living novelists, yet his name cannot be mentioned in the national press. 

Beijing’s censorship of his books – banned for the last 30 years – has been effective. 

Recently, a well read and accomplished Shanghai editor told me, after I mentioned Ma, that she had never heard of him. 

“What kind of books does he write?” she asked, perplexed. 

“Does he write in Chinese?”
In the last chapters of China Dream, Ma Daode, remembering his own life and the lives of his parents, tries to renounce his need to mourn. 

He could be speaking to us, or to China’s contemporary writers and historians, or to the future, when he says: “Those who have tears, lend them to those who have none.” 

Last year, an essay by Chinese blogger Zhang Wumao, which described Beijing as a city where people “cannot move, cannot breathe”, and where migrant workers “strive for over a decade to buy an apartment the size of a bird cage”, went viral. 

It was swiftly censored and erased from the internet, and Chinese state media reprimanded Zhang, insisting that Beijingers “are all the more real because of their dreams”. 

The fictional Ma Daode, too, wishes to be remade by fantasies. 

He goes to great lengths to step out of history, to be reborn and absolved by a beautiful dream.
Ma has a marksman’s eye for the contradictions of his country and his generation, and the responsibilities and buried dreams they carry. 

His perceptiveness, combined with a genius for capturing people who come from all classes, occupations, backgrounds and beliefs; for identifying the fallibility, comedy and despair of living in absurd times, has allowed him to compassionately detail China’s complex inner lives. 

Censoring his novels and banning his name have been Beijing’s cynical response to Ma’s artistry, and to the human lives that the novelist cannot forget, even as the Chinese Dream envelops them.

• China Dream by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew (Chatto, £12.99). 

Ma Jian: ‘Freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant’

The exiled Chinese writer on the murder of dissidents, attacks on free speech and his new novel exposing the brutality of his homeland

Interview by Claire Armitstead

‘Everyone thought economic expansion meant China would become increa­singly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation’ … the novelist Ma Jian. 

In an era of growing political impunity, when dissidents are murdered on foreign soil and even the head of Interpol is not immune from being “disappeared”, Ma Jian seems almost recklessly brave. Could there be a more provocative title than that given by the exiled novelist to his latest satirical onslaught on the country of his birth? 

For, with China Dream, he co-opts the rhetoric of the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to tell the story of a politician who is driven mad by memories of his own corruption.
Xi first used the phrase shortly after becoming general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, and Ma has responded “in a rush of rage” with a short, ferocious novel about the way turbo-capitalism and authoritarianism have combined to inform a Chinese dream that excludes all but a chosen few. 

“I wanted to give myself the challenge of encapsulating everything in as few words as possible,” he says, wryly adding that it will be interesting to see how the Chinese authorities react to the novel, given that they’ve outlawed so many “key words” online – “even the name Winnie-the-Pooh is banned because people joked that Xi Jinping resembled him”.
A momentary silence falls as we consider the surreal possibility of the “paramount leader” being forced to ban his own slogan. 

But the reality, Ma acknowledges, is that censorship is now so all-encompassing that the novel will very probably not be allowed to exist in Chinese, even in Hong Kong, which has historically provided a toehold for work by dissident authors banned on the mainland.

‘Today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined’ … Ma Jian. 

In a tranquil London cafe, close to the home he shares with his translator and partner Flora Drew and their four children, the risks this slight, 65-year-old writer is taking are hard to comprehend. 

Despite living in the UK for 17 years, he does not speak English. 

It’s not as if he hasn’t tried, says Drew, who translates our interview, but he has a stubborn devotion to his mother tongue and remains more engaged with goings-on in China than those in his adopted country. 

“Living in the west allows me to see through the fog of lies that shrouds my homeland,” he writes in the foreword to China Dream. 

During the interview, he invokes Dante’s Divine Comedy: “It’s only through being expelled that the poet gets to see heaven and hell and purgatory.”
It was a perspective forced on him from his earliest days, as one of five children born into a well-to-do family in the provincial city of Qingdao in 1953. 

A childhood in which he had already shown promise as an artist came to an abrupt end with the start of the Cultural Revolution. 

He was 13 years old. 

His art teacher was persecuted as a “rightist” and his grandfather, a landlord and tea connoisseur, was executed. 

At 15, he joined an arts propaganda troupe, beginning an adult life that would take him through various industrial assignments to a job as a photojournalist. 

He married a dancer and had the regulation single child. 

Then a photography prize brought him to the attention of the authorities and he was transferred to work for the foreign propaganda unit of the Federation of Trade Unions in Beijing.

‘When a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul’ … Ma Jian. 

There, living in a “one‑bed shack”, he connected with a buzzy young community of writers and artists. 

Officially, he worked as a journalist. 

Unofficially, he made and occasionally sold paintings. 

“Mostly they were stolen, but a man from the US embassy bought one for $40,” he recalls. 

“My hair was encrusted with oil paint and the walls were papered with my paintings.”
In 1983, just as he turned 30, he hit the crisis that would upend his life. 

Divorced from his wife, who forbade him to make contact with his daughter, he was arrested for “spiritual pollution”. 

Though Ma was released, his shack was ransacked and his canvases ripped up. 

“I never painted again,” he says. 

“I saw what a fragile medium it was, and how vulnerable to abuse and persecution, and I asked myself what was I going to do for the rest of my life?”
In his attempt to answer this question he converted to Buddhism and set off on a three-year journey across China on foot. 

At first, he was afraid even to record what he witnessed in his notebook, in case it fell into the wrong hands, but gradually, he says, “I saw that through literature I could paint my own reality. I could record history.”
He arrived in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to find a people whose traditions had been corrupted by poverty and political oppression even as they celebrated the 20th anniversary of their “liberation” to the status of autonomous region. 

In 1987, Ma poured his impressions into a collection of short stories, belatedly published in English as Stick Out Your Tongue. 

It was immediately banned by the Chinese censors, sending him into an exile from which he has never permanently returned, though until six years ago he was allowed to visit China, and continues to keep in close contact with friends and family.
He turns up for the interview with a dramatically bandaged thumb, the result of an accident while building a shed in his garden, the explanation of which leads on to one of his latest frustrations. 

He had written a letter to one of his brothers inviting him to come over to help, he says, “but during this time there was a huge demo of disgruntled veterans demanding higher benefits, so the whole town had been sealed off and surrounded by armed police. No information was able to get in or out, so the letter has probably been handed over to the authorities. What happened there shows how today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined, because these events don’t even reach public consciousness: it’s as if they never happened.”

It is not only China that troubles Ma today. 

“The world is becoming increasingly unsafe,” he says. 

“Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi: within the space of seven minutes we saw the triumph of barbarism over civilisation. But this is happening every day in China. Everyone thought we could ignore what happened in 1989 [the Tiananmen Square massacre] and that economic expansion meant it would become increasingly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation. China might have draped itself in a coat of prosperity, but inside it’s become more brutal than ever, and it’s this venomous combination of extreme authoritarianism and extreme capitalism which has infected countries around the world.”
Erasure of memory is the abiding theme of Ma’s work, whether through the literal motif of an unconscious man in his epic 2008 novel Beijing Coma, set around Tiananmen Square, or through the allegorical pursuit of a recipe for “Old Lady Broth of Amnesia” to which the municipal leader Ma Daode devotes himself in China Dream, tormented by a past in which he drove his own parents to suicide by denouncing them. 

“The process of dragging back memories that are being constantly erased, especially from my position of exile, makes even more important to me the primacy of memory,” Ma says, “and how it not only involves a nation’s sense of history but a person’s sense of self.”
His satire is always firmly located in violations of the human body. 

Stick Out Your Tongue told stories of ritual rape and multi-generational incest. 

In his 2013 novel, The Dark Road, aborted late-term foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled in Cantonese restaurants to make potency soups for men. 

The fourth of China Dream’s seven episodes takes Ma Daode to a strip club, where VIPs have orgies in Mao’s private room with women who are identified only by numbers. 

The reason for this, he explains, is because “totalitarianism not only seeks to control the thought but also the body in which those thoughts are housed”.
“As a writer, when you are trying to describe your characters, there’s a visceral connection to their being. But in my exploration of the body I’m always trying to show that in these systems, when a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul. Sometimes, the body can survive but a lot of the time it becomes no more than a carcass.”
Red Dust, his semi-fictionalised 2001 account of his life-changing three-year journey, introduced another persistent theme, betrayal. 

It recounted how he was twice betrayed by an actor girlfriend, whom he, in turn, considered denouncing to the film studio that employed her, out of jealousy over her infidelity. 

None of his characters is without blame, but neither are they entirely evil. 

Even Ma Daode in China Dream attempts to warn protesters that they will be killed if they refuse to move out when bulldozers arrive to clear their homes for redevelopment.

Exiled author Ma Jian banned from visiting China

Ma relates his story quietly and urgently through Drew, keeping his own record of the conversation in spidery Chinese script. 

The couple met in 1997 when she was working on a TV documentary about the handover of Hong Kong to China and he was one of the few local people who agreed to speak. 

He invited her to a poetry reading and gave her all his books to read; she stayed on to finish them, and by the time she left they were together. 

He moved briefly to Germany after the handover before joining her in London. 

She has translated everything he has written since. 

Does she worry that his repeated attacks on China may put him in danger? 

“This is the first time I’ve felt concerned, because there’s a brazenness to the behaviour now and they can do it without any backlash at all,” she says.
But the couple have kept faith with the best of the country, sending their 15-year-old son to study martial arts at a Shaolin monastery and to spend time with his Chinese family. 

Ma plans to travel to the Hong Kong literary festival this month, to present his novel in English. 

“I refuse to be afraid,” he says. 

“The disregard for truth is infectious. It also explains the rise of Trump. We need to protect concepts of humanity, and freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant. The more you buckle under these pressures, the huger the monster becomes. One’s responsibility as a writer is to be fearless.”

Hong Kong arts centre cancels Chinese dissident author event

Exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian was due to promote his satiric novel China Dream

Ma Jian, who lives in London, writes dark satirical books about life in China.

A Hong Kong arts centre hosting the city’s high-profile literary festival has cancelled appearances by exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian, said the author, as Beijing tightens its grip on the semi-autonomous city.
It is the latest blow to freedom of speech in Hong Kong as concerns grow that liberties are under serious threat from an assertive China.
Ma, who now lives in London, writes dark and satirical works depicting life in China and his books are banned on the mainland.
He was due to promote his latest novel China Dream later this week, a title that plays on Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s rhetoric of national rejuvenation and is described by publisher Penguin as “a biting satire of totalitarianism”.
The author announced on Twitter that his two speaking events had been cancelled by Tai Kwun arts centre, where the festival is held, not by festival organisers who he said were trying to find an alternative venue.
“Just been told that my two events at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival this week can no longer be held at Tai Kwun, where all the other events are taking place. An alternative venue will have to be found. No reason has been given to me yet,” he said in his tweet.
Hong Kong’s government says it wants to turn the city into an arts and culture hub, with Tai Kwun the result of a multimillion-dollar renovation of a colonial-era prison and police station, led by the government and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Tai Kwun and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival were unable to immediately comment.
Hong Kong has rights that are not enjoyed on the mainland, protected by an agreement made before the city was handed back to China by Britain in 1997, but there are fears they are being steadily eroded.

A highly anticipated art show by Chinese political cartoonist Badiucao was cancelled last week with Hong Kong organisers citing safety concerns due to “threats made by Chinese authorities relating to the artist”.

Hong Kong authorities also faced a major backlash when they denied a visa without explanation last month to a Financial Times journalist who had chaired a press club talk by a Hong Kong independence activist.
The Hong Kong literary festival attracts leading authors from around the world and this year features Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh and bestselling American author Cheryl Strayed.

Die Endlösung der Hanfrage

The dark side of China’s national renewal
The race-based ideas of the country’s leaders have unwelcome historical echoes
By Jamil Anderlini

Examples of the west ceding global leadership seem to have become a weekly occurrence. 

In the vacuum left behind it is natural to look for a replacement and for many, including the mandarins in Beijing, China appears to be the most credible.
But how much do we know about the kind of global leader China wants to be? 

The best place to start is with the stated intentions of the country’s leaders. 

On assuming the mantle of the ruling Communist party’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi Jinping declared it his mission to realise the “China Dream”, which he defined as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, according to official translations.
This phrase has been repeated ad nauseam since then and has come to underpin and justify everything China does. 

Building a new silk road to Europe, rapid expansion of the People’s Liberation Army and militarising artificial islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea — all are part of the glorious task of rejuvenation.
To an English-speaking ear, rejuvenation has positive connotations and all nations have the right to rejuvenate themselves through peaceful efforts.
But the official translation of this crucial slogan is deeply misleading. 

In Chinese it is “Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing” and the important part of the phrase is “Zhonghua minzu” — the “Chinese nation” according to party propaganda. 

A more accurate, although not perfect, translation would be the “Chinese race”.
That is certainly how it is interpreted in China. 

The concept technically includes all 56 official ethnicities, including Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Koreans, but is almost universally understood to mean the majority Han ethnic group, who make up more than 90 per cent of the population.
The most interesting thing about Zhonghua minzu is that it very deliberately and specifically incorporates anyone with Chinese blood anywhere in the world, no matter how long ago their ancestors left the Chinese mainland.
“The Chinese race is a big family and feelings of love for the motherland, passion for the homeland, are infused in the blood of every single person with Chinese ancestry,” asserted Li Keqiang in a recent speech.
This concept is reflected in Hong Kong where any recent arrival who can convince the authorities they are at least part “Chinese” can get citizenship. 

Meanwhile, people of Indian or white British descent whose families have lived in the territory for over a century will never be granted full citizenship rights.
Some theoreticians in Beijing even argue the modern idea of the sovereign nation state is an illegitimate western invention that contradicts the traditional Chinese notion of “all under heaven”, with the Chinese emperor at the centre and power radiating out from the Forbidden City to every corner of the earth.
Race-based ideas of national rejuvenation and manifest destiny have deep and uncomfortable echoes in 20th-century history and earlier European colonial expansion. 

That is why Communist party translators have opted for the misleading official translation of “nation” rather than “race”.
For many in the Chinese diaspora this linguistic trick does nothing to ease their discomfort as they are increasingly called on to contribute to the “great rejuvenation” regardless of their nationality or attitudes towards the ruling Communist party. 

Li said it was the duty of all people of Chinese descent to help achieve the investment, technological development and trade goals of the People’s Republic of China.
He said they are also required to promote traditional Chinese culture (as defined by the Communist party) all over the world and to unwaveringly oppose Taiwan’s independence.
In exchange for compliance, the party offers the prospect of belonging to the “great family” of the Chinese race as well as a chance to participate in the country’s continued economic boom. 

But those who reject their filial duty to the Communist party risk being labelled “race traitors”, vilified within expatriate communities and banned from visiting mainland China.
For countries in China’s own neighbourhood the rhetoric of rejuvenation has starker implications. Under past dynasties and emperors large swaths of their current territory were conquered and controlled by China.
The logic of China’s great rejuvenation is essentially revanchist and assumes the country is still a long way from regaining its rightful level of power, influence and even territory.
The dangerous question for the rest of the world is at what point China will feel it has reached peak rejuvenation and what that will look like for everyone who is not included in the great family of the Chinese race.

China dream: Beijing, the city where you can't escape smog

China's capital is notorious for its chronic pollution. Even indoors it's a struggle to find clean air.
By John Sudworth.

A normal day in Beijing
Having already taped most of my windows shut, I have now started on the air conditioning vents. 

The aim is simple -- to close off every access point through which the toxic outside air leaks into our Beijing home.
Even our double-glazing doesn't keep out the smog. 

The most dangerous constituent, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter -- or PM2.5 as it's known -- finds a way through the tiniest of gaps where the windows close.
So the only solution there is duct tape.
It's like a re-enactment of a 1970s government information film on surviving a nuclear holocaust. 

Only it's not radiation we're trying to keep at bay, but the fallout from fossil fuels.
The most useful device in our armoury is our PM2.5 monitor. 

We have two, one upstairs and one downstairs, which we glance at frequently, and it was their arrival that prompted the frenzy of taping and draught-excluding that continues to this day.
When I first arrived in China, five years ago, there was no way of monitoring the quality of air in our home. 

Like everyone else, we left it to blind faith that our air purifiers were doing the trick. It now transpires they weren't. 

Even now on highly polluted days, we struggle to get our PM2.5 count much below 25 micrograms per cubic meter, the World Health Organization's maximum standard for safe air.
And that's with multiple purifiers running at full tilt, large box-like machines that sit in the corner of every room -- two in some -- the combined noise output of which is akin to living in the engine room of an aircraft carrier.

Shoppers look at air purifiers in Beijing
China's air pollution problem is now so bad that its effects are measured in more than a million premature deaths a year and markedly reduced life expectancy -- an average of more than five years or so -- in the worst-affected regions.
Over the past few weeks, a period of particularly acute and prolonged air pollution, the average air quality in Beijing has been well above 200 micrograms of PM2.5 particles per cubic metre -- many times the maximum safe limit.
During the worst of it, it's been like living under house arrest, our children confined to the small, deafening but breathable indoor space of our home for days on end.
And across China, the smog becomes a dominant topic on social media, with the population tracking the foulness of the air via mobile phone apps.
One group of Beijing mothers, armed with their own PM2.5 counters, have even been roaming the city in search of shopping malls or cafes with filtered air -- and then sharing their discoveries online.
Of course, humanity's dependence on oil and coal long predate China's economic rise. 

But China offers a vision of environmental degradation far in excess of the pea-souper fogs of 1950s London or Manchester.
For much of the past month the cloud of toxic air hanging over this country has extended for thousands of miles, a giant, continent-sized cocktail of soot from coal fired power stations and car exhausts, smothering the lives and filling the lungs of hundreds of millions of people.
While growing awareness means that more of them are now taking action to protect their health, many others are either not fully informed about the danger or don't have the means to do much about it.
A set of new filters for a single air purifier can cost £100 ($120) or more and needs changing every six months or so.
It is, of course, not a problem only of China's making. 

The smartphones, computers, TV screens, jeans and shoes that have been pouring out of its factories over the past few decades are cheap, in part at least, precisely because they're made without environmental safeguards.
The interests of the rich world and an unaccountable Chinese Communist elite have neatly dovetailed. 

The West gets its cheap consumer desirables and China gets rich without the inconvenience of the independent scrutiny, regulation or democratic oversight of other markets.
The true cost is measured by the numbers on my pollution monitors, and it is one being borne disproportionately by ordinary Chinese people.
Following a crackdown on a rare protest against pollution in the central city of Chengdu recently, one blogger dared to speak out in favour of the protesters. 

The police, he suggested, should bear in mind that the elites, whose interests they protect, have sent their families to breathe clean air overseas.
He was promptly detained.

Poetoxic Beijing

Plagues of China

Chinese Pollution, a Stubborn Visitor
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and ADAM WU
Dancing at a park blanketed by severe smog in Fuyang, China, on Tuesday

BEIJING — Like ghosts floating in a dim netherworld, the dancers twirled, spun and curtsied in smog so dense that couples a few steps away seemed to be murky apparitions suspended in a gray haze. 

Filthy air has swamped much of northern China for weeks, but some amateur dancers have stuck to their outdoor ballroom routines.
The specterlike dancers in Fuyang, a city in Anhui Province, this week have become one of the images that capture China’s latest winter of smog. 

A wintertime surge in pollution here is often called an “airpocalypse” in foreign news reports. 

But as these images suggest, living in this miasma has become for many residents a routine to be endured, with an outdoor fox trot.
People on scooters and bicycles navigated the thick haze in Fuyang, on Tuesday.

“The scariest thing isn’t the smog, it’s how we’ve become numbed and used to it,” said one comment about the pictures on a Chinese news website, 163.com. 

Others shrugged off the bleakness with sardonic humor, as people here often do.
“There’s nothing scary,” said another comment on the same website. 

“Breathing fresh smog every day, I feel fortunate to be living in this magical country.”
Air pollution is chronic across much of industrialized China, but it worsens in winter, when coal-burning heaters fire up and add to the airborne grunge from factories and power plants. 

An uptick in heavy industry in 2016 has added to the haze this winter, some experts say. 

In the cold months, polluted air can accumulate across the region, sloshing from one part to another until strong gusts blow it away — until another pool accumulates. 

Smog extended from the port city of Tianjin deep into central China on Thursday.
Tianjin on Tuesday. 

On Tuesday in Fuyang, the air quality there was poor, but not terrible by the hard-bitten standards of many Chinese cities. 

The level of PM2.5 pollution, the fine particulates that pose the greatest danger to health, reached an average 283 micrograms per cubic meter, and the air was classified “severely polluted.”
But since December, levels across many cities in northern China have gone much higher, even reaching 1,000 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter last month in Shijiazhuang, a city in Hebei Province. 

The World Health Organization recommends daily exposure of no more than 25 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter.
Many residents have become increasingly sensitive to the health threats from air pollution. 

Patience with the smog is wearing thin, especially among middle-class residents, who can afford to travel and experience life and breathing outside the dome of haze.
The government has promised to clean up the air, and indeed there have been improvements, especially throughout the summer last year. 

Yet that progress has made the return of the smog this winter even more jarring. 

Travelers returning by air to Beijing lately have descended from blue skies onto a Stygian underworld. 

For those trying to leave, many flights have been delayed or cancelled on the worst days because of the poor visibility.
Planes parked at the Beijing Capital International Airport on Wednesday.

What worries many people most is the risk to children and the elderly. 

This week, a letter in the name of Beijing parents urged the city government to allow schools and parents to buy fresh air equipment for classrooms. 

Officials said air filters would be installed in some schools as a tryout, though not the bigger equipment the letter called for.
“We really don’t want to wait any longer!” said the letter, which circulated widely on the internet. “The smog won’t wait for us.”
Many people in Beijing and other affected Chinese cities now routinely wear masks — a novelty even a few years ago — although often they use cheap, flimsy cotton covers that do little to ward off PM2.5 particles.
Beijing on Wednesday. 

“This winter was the first time I’ve thought about moving away,” said Lu Xin, a manager with an internet firm, breathing through a high-tech mask attached to its own electric air filter. 

“My 3-year-old boy and my parents cooped up at home every day, never going out. Is that a way to live?”

China Dream

A Poem Praises Smog, and Why Not? It’s From Cancer’s Perspective
By KAROLINE KAN

A farmer walking through heavy smog on the outskirts of Beijing on Saturday. 

BEIJING — For millions of Chinese, the new year opened under an oppressive shroud of smog that has closed highways, delayed or canceled hundreds of flights and shut down schools, forcing some students to follow their lessons from home through online streaming.
The toxic air has also drawn attention to a poem written by a Chinese surgeon from the viewpoint of an ambitious lung cancer that revels in the “delicious mist and haze.”

The poem was first published in English in the October issue of Chest, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, under the title “I Long to Be King.” 

Excerpts from the poem were posted in Chinese this week in The Paper, a news website, and widely reported on by other Chinese media.
The author, Dr. Zhao Xiaogang, 40, who is deputy chief of thoracic surgery at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital of Tongji University, opens with a “ground-glass opacity,” an image of a CT scan of fluid in the lungs that can indicate a range of disorders, but in this case is the first indication of what will develop into a triumphantly lethal cancer. 

It is abetted by its host’s unhealthy habits, but also the host’s smoggy environment:

I long to be king, 

With my fellows swimming in every vessel. 

My people crawl in your organs and body,

Holding the rights for life or death, I tremble with excitement.

It continues:

None cared when I was young,

But all fear me when full grown.

I’ve been nourished on the delicious mist and haze, 

That sweetly warmed my heart

The Chinese version of the poem has attracted hundreds of comments on Weibo.
One Weibo user sarcastically wrote, “The government should be proud. We have information about China’s air pollution published in the U.S.! More literary works should be shared in international publications!”
Another said of Dr. Zhao’s poem, “When China has a surge in cancer in a few years, we’ll appreciate how right the author was.”
A Weibo commenter wrote, “I wonder why the smog keeps getting worse if the government is working on solutions.”
And there was a hint of caution in another user’s post: “Doctor, I think you’re going to be invited by the authorities soon to have a chat.”
Lung cancer is the leading form of cancer in China, and while smoking, especially among men, is a prime culprit, Dr. Zhao stressed in the Paper article the contribution of PM2.5, the dangerous fine particles suspended in smog.

Dr. Zhao Xiaogang.

“PM2.5 was declared a carcinogen by the World Health Organization as early as 2013,” he said. 

“No matter how developed the medical technology is, if people are exposed to smog, especially severe smog, they are at risk.”
Global Times quoted him as making a direct link. 

“The intense rise in lung cancer,” he said, “is intimately related to smog.”
Dr. Zhao has long written poetry as a pastime. 

But in 2015, while a visiting scholar at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and at Washington University in St. Louis, he heard that some academic journals published poetry. 

Last year, he submitted his poem to Chest, which ran it in its October issue.
“As a thoracic surgeon, I have diagnosed many patients with ground-glass opacity adenocarcinoma in my regular clinical practice,” he said in an telephone interview, referring to tumors. 

“I hope this poem will help more people understand it and take it seriously.”
As for why the poem was told from a cancer’s perspective, Dr. Zhao said he was inspired by reading science fiction.
“I think everything in this world has consciousness and determination,” he said.
“Sometimes when I look at the scan images and see the shadows of G.G.O., I can feel it growing stronger with a will and a tribe of its own,” he added, referring to ground-glass opacity. 

“So I thought, why not write down what the G.G.O. and cancer would be thinking?”
Dr. Zhao said that in his surgical practice he has noticed more and more nonsmokers who have developed lung cancer.
“Most of the female lung cancer patients are nonsmokers,” he said. 

“Some are little girls. I even had a 9-year-old patient, a little girl, and we had to cut out part of her lung. I’ll never forget her.”

China Dream: millions start new year shrouded by health alerts and travel chaos

On the first day of 2017 in Beijing pollution climbed as high as 24 times the level recommended by the World Health Organization

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Two men play Chinese chess beside a lake on a heavily polluted day in Beijing on 1 January. 
Millions in China rang in the New Year shrouded in a thick blanket of toxic smog, causing road closures and flight cancellations as 24 cities issued alerts that will last through much of the week.
On the first day of 2017 in Beijing, concentrations of tiny particles that penetrate deep into the lungs climbed as high as 24 times levels recommended by the World Health Organization. 

More than 100 flights were cancelled and all intercity buses were halted at the capital’s airport.

In the neighbouring port city of Tianjin, more than 300 flights were cancelled while the weather forecast warned thick smog will persist until 5 January. 

All of the city’s highways were also shut as low visibility made driving hazardous, effectively trapping residents.
Across northern China 24 cities issued red alerts on Friday and Saturday, while orange alerts persisted in 21 cities through the New Year holiday. 

A red alert is the highest level of a four-tier warning system introduced as part of China’s high-profile war on pollution.
Decades of economic development have made acrid air a common occurrence in nearly all major Chinese cities, with government-owned coal burning power stations and heating plants and steel manufacturing concentrated in northern provinces the main source of pollution.

Beautiful China: Landmark buildings are seen through smog on 1 January in Beijing.

Smog worsens in the winter as coal burning spikes to provide heat for millions of people. 

China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014, but has struggled to deliver the sweeping change many had hoped to see and government inspections routinely find pollutions flouting the law.
“Why didn’t those polluting industries take a rest for the holiday,” one commenter mused on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
“New Year’s morning in Beijing, I thought I was blind,” said another, attaching a photo of a window completely darkened with grey haze.
Similar posts appeared on Twitter.

China’s middle class is increasingly less tolerant of the deadly air, and in December tens of thousands of “smog refugees” decamped to clearer skies. 

Top destinations included Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the Maldives.
That bout of smog saw 460 million people, a population greater than North America, breathing toxic air, according to Greenpeace.
As pollution covered swaths of the country on New Year’s Eve, China announced plans to increase coal output to 3.9 billion tonnes by 2020.
A study earlier this year found acrid air is linked to at least one million deaths a year, and contributed to a third of all fatalities in major cities, on par with smoking. 

Another research paper said the smog had shortened life expectancies by five and a half years in parts of China.

China Dream

SMOG IN CHINA PROMPTS TIDE OF TOURISM FLEEING ‘AIRPOCALYPSE’ 
BY DAMIEN SHARKOV 

The heavy smog enveloping northern China is creating a tide of “smog refugees,” traveling elsewhere in a bid for temporary respite from the pollution in their home region, travel agents warn.
Smog has become a periodic problem for China, prompting a red alert most recently in Hebei province and the municipality of Beijing this month.
China’s online travel agency Ctrip estimated that 150,000 would travel overseas in December, to escape the smog, news website China Daily reported Monday.
Ctrip claims that on its cellphone app, the phrases “avoiding smog” and “lung cleansing” have become top searches with more than 5,000 results.
China’s state-run Global Times labelled the smog phenomenon an “airpocalypse,” while the decision to stay away while it literally blows over—a “lung vacation”.
The smog has already prompted a drop in steel and iron ore futures for a sixth consecutive session Wednesday as construction and industrial activities were halted.

China Dream

China’s ‘airpocalypse’ hits half a billion people
By Yuan Yang in Beijing

Return of 'airpocalypse'

China Dream
The government has shut schools, restricted road traffic and urged people to stay indoors as 24 cities across northeast China were put on “red alert” for extreme smog on Tuesday.
China's most severe bout of air pollution this year has hit 460m people, who are exposed to smog levels six times higher than the World Health Organisation’s daily guidelines, according to calculations by Greenpeace. 

The smog has lasted over three days in many areas.
As of 11am local time, 217 flights at Beijing Capital Airport had been cancelled — almost a third of the total scheduled for the whole day.
Pollution has become a rallying topic for Chinese citizens. 

“The smog problem is a man-made disaster, local environment bureaux are not fulfilling their responsibilities,” wrote the top-rated online poster under a news article about the smog.
Two weeks ago, Beijing’s city legislature considered classifying smog as a “weather disaster”. 

The move was questioned by environmental researchers who said it would help polluters escape responsibility for man-made pollution.
“The government is under too little pressure. It’s not enough to make them reform and make people’s lives their top priority,” wrote another online poster going by the initials HJ. 

“The people are under too much pressure — if we try to protest, we’re said to be 'creating public disorder’."
Earlier this month, a planned protest against smog in the southwestern city of Chengdu was pre-empted by riot police who shut down the city’s central square. 

Sit-in protesters wearing smog masks were detained by police for questioning.
“The link between smog and industry is clear. Since the second quarter of this year, when steel prices and output started growing, we saw air quality decline in the northeast,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, an air pollution specialist at Greenpeace in Beijing. 

“It’s a result of the government’s old-fashioned stimulus that boosted the industrial sectors.”
China’s smog is worst in the winter, when households consume more electricity from coal-fired power plants, and municipal heating is turned on.
In response to the emergency, the Ministry of Environmental Protection sent out three inspection teams, and publicly singled out chemical manufacturing companies that had failed to shut down their operations under the red-alert regulations, as well as power plants and coal-burning plants that had not met environmental standards.
The northeastern port city of Tianjin closed all but one of the highways in and out of the city because of poor visibility on the weekend. 

Over 30 flights were grounded at its international airport over the weekend.
Beijing, which has been on red alert since Friday, halved the number of motor vehicles allowed on the road on any given day by banning even- and odd-numbered license-plates on different days.
Ikea said that customer deliveries would be slower because of the vehicle restrictions while Taobao, China’s most popular online marketplace, warned customers that packages might be delayed because of the smog. 

SF Express, one of China’s largest logistic companies, said the heavy smog would delay packages for customers in Beijing, Tianjin and part of Hebei province for up to two days.
And visitors hoping to taste the capital’s most famous dish would have been disappointed on the weekend, when restaurants were banned from burning wood for roasting ducks. 

Plagued by industrial overcapacity, the Chinese government is now trying to shift the economy towards the service sector, and letting factories close in the industrial rust-belt of the northeast.