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.”