'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).