The Fat Years (34 page)

“I really don’t have any memory at all,” answered Lao Chen.

He Dongsheng started to laugh—a sort of gurgling from his throat—it was still hard for him to talk. “I’d like another glass of water,” he said as he swallowed to clear his throat.

“Professor He,” pressed Fang Caodi, “can you explain it to us? That year when everyone was given a bird flu vaccination. It was really a drug created by the Office of Stability Maintenance to make us all forget, right?”

“No, it wasn’t,” corrected He Dongsheng. “The bird flu vaccination was to prevent bird flu, and only ten or twenty million people were actually vaccinated. Where would the Office of Stability Maintenance find such an amazing amnesiac drug? It would be wonderful if we did have one. Then our Communist Party could rewrite its history any way it wanted to.”

“Then what was the real reason why everyone forgot?” asked Fang Caodi.

“Was it the Ecstasy in the water?” asked Little Xi.

“How should I know?” He Dongsheng began to laugh again, a genuine, mirthful laugh. “If you ask me for the real reason, I can only tell you that I haven’t a clue! Don’t think we can control everything. Many things happen that are beyond our expectations. We never dreamed that the month you’re talking about would just disappear from people’s memories.”

“If you don’t know, then who does?” asked Fang Caodi. “Don’t try to keep anything from us …”

“I’m not trying to hide anything. Let me tell you everything I know. After the ‘Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis’ began to meet with some success, the first sentence in a
People’s Daily
editorial was ‘Since the global economy has entered a period of crisis, China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy has officially begun …’ It was only editorial rhetoric to put these two events together in the same sentence. After that, the sentence was picked up. It ricocheted across the media until everybody could recite it by heart.

“At that time, the Central Propaganda Bureau issued another report that mention of the intervening twenty-eight days was dwindling, even on the Internet. We thought people couldn’t stand to remember those hard times, and everyone was too busy making and spending money.

“This was very good for the Party. Anarchy and suppression are not exactly splendid states—they’re bloody affairs, even sinful, if you’re a religious person. So the Propaganda Bureau took advantage of the situation and forbade all news media, including the Internet, from discussing those twenty-eight days. You know China’s Internet-control techniques are the best in the world, and of course the traditional media wouldn’t dare disobey our orders. Besides that, after China’s prosperity and ascendancy began, everybody lost interest in the West. Now the Chinese people prefer to watch our own colorful media, and only a tiny minority still watch non-Chinese media sources. In this way those already rarely discussed twenty-eight days completely disappeared from our public discourse.

“And then something unimaginable happened that to this day I still cannot fathom: more and more people genuinely forgot those twenty-eight days, and it was not just temporary memory loss, but they absolutely could not remember that time, just as though the whole country had unconsciously erased some painful childhood trauma.

“People in middle age and above had not really forgotten the earlier Cultural Revolution and June 4, 1989. It was just that during these two years of China’s ascendancy, everybody was living very well and very few people had any interest in recalling the Cultural Revolution and June 1989, so those memories just naturally faded away.

“But people were
really
unable to remember those twenty-eight days. Whether this was related to the water or not, I can’t say for sure. The leaders living in Zhongnanhai have their own drinking water. We don’t drink what the rest of the people drink, although there might have been a few of us without sufficient self-discipline who went around drinking ordinary water, I can’t say for certain. What I can tell you is that most of the leaders in Zhongnanhai can definitely recall those twenty-eight days, and they are also fully aware that the whole nation is suffering from a form of both collective and selective amnesia.

“When I first realized what was happening, I went around sounding out various groups, including mid- and low-level cadres and specialist scholars. Just as I expected, they really had no recollection of that time; it was like they had brainwashed themselves. It was all so strange, but it was definitely true.

“It was for the best that they didn’t remember. The previous leadership group, having the blood of those twenty-eight days on their hands, was very eager for everyone to forget the events of that month. So they started to revise any materials that reported on that time. For example, they ordered that all newspapers in all public libraries should be in digital form only. We totally rewrote the history of those twenty-eight days. Most importantly, we brought the date that China’s ascendancy officially began forward to match the date that the global economy entered the period of crisis and stagflation, thus erasing the historical existence of that week of anarchy and those three weeks of harsh crackdown. No one objected to this distortion of reality, and practically no one even noticed it. Once in a while, when someone in or outside the country mentioned those events, we simply filtered them out. Very soon the new version of things became the only available version. To tell you the truth, even I was pretty surprised: how could the Chinese people so easily forget such events?

“What I want to tell you is that, definitely, the Central Propaganda organs did do their work, but they were only pushing along a boat that was already on the move. If the Chinese people themselves had not already wanted to forget, we could not have forced them to do so. The Chinese people voluntarily gave themselves a large dose of amnesia medicine.”

“Why?” asked Little Xi and Fang Caodi together. “Why did the Chinese people do it? How could they? There must be some explanation.”

“Didn’t I tell you already,” insisted He Dongsheng. “I don’t know!”

Little Xi and Fang Caodi were dumbfounded.

“I’m quite puzzled, too,” added He Dongsheng, seeing that they were all speechless. “Real life isn’t like a detective novel, and everything doesn’t have a perfect explanation. I have to admit this is one big riddle that I can’t solve. It could be that human beings are simply forgetful animals and they long to forget some aspects of their history. It could be that the Chinese Communist Party is just plain lucky. It could be that the Chinese people deserve to be governed by the Communist Party, and sixty-plus years is still not enough. It could be a miracle, or the Chinese people’s common karma. Too bad I’m a materialist, otherwise I would certainly say that it was the Will of Heaven, that Heaven wants the Chinese Communist Party to go on governing. Heaven saved my Party!” He gave another deep laugh.

Little Xi and Fang Caodi sat there expressionless and depressed. He Dongsheng looked victorious. Lao Chen sat there staring blankly at nothing. After a long while he regained his composure and saw that it was already growing light outside.

“Brother Dongsheng, let me remind you again that we have all made a ‘live or die together’ pact. No one is going to reveal anything that was said here last night. That way we can continue living our ordinary lives and you can continue living your official-promotion-and-money-spinning life. You think it over carefully. People, if there’s nothing else, I’ll let Mr. He go home.”

The others remained silent, so Lao Chen gently addressed their captive. “You can go now.”

He Dongsheng hesitated for a moment, rose, felt his arms up and down, and walked slowly to the door. Then he turned around and said by way of justification, “You think I care about official promotion and making money? I do what I do for the sake of the nation and the people.”

They all looked at him expressionlessly.

“Believe it or not, as you wish,” added He Dongsheng serenely, and then he walked out the door. A few moments later, they heard his SUV drive away.

Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi sat there in silence.

They walked slowly outside into the dawn light.

“I’d better go,” said Fang Caodi.

“Fine,” said Lao Chen.

“Can I give you a lift into town?” asked Fang Caodi.

“No, thanks,” said Lao Chen. “It’s light now. Little Xi and I will go and catch a bus. You’d better get going.”

Fang Caodi gave each one of them a hug, said his good-byes, climbed into his Jeep Cherokee, and drove off.

“Master Chen,” asked Zhang Dou, “are we going to be in any trouble?”

“I guess it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Lao Chen.

Zhang Dou nodded.

“Take good care of Miaomiao,” said Little Xi.

The three of them hugged for a long time and said good-bye.

“I have some friends on the Yunnan border,” Lao Chen said to Little Xi, “who have never had that small-small high feeling. Shall we go and visit them?”

“If it’s no trouble,” Little Xi answered after a moment’s thought, “I’d like to bring my mother, too.”

“No trouble at all,” said Lao Chen with a smile.

The eastern sky was bright, and the two of them shaded their eyes as they walked arm in arm into the harsh light of day.

The Fat Years
is a unique combination of a mystery novel with a realistic exposé of the political, economic, and social system of China as it is today, and will be for the foreseeable future.

The novel posits a mystery while at the same time offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the mystery takes place. We don’t learn how the mystery came about or why until very near the end. In the meantime, there are several related questions: what happened during a spell of exactly twenty-eight days in the spring of 2011 when the government carried out one of the Chinese Communist Party’s periodic violent crackdowns? Why are most Chinese people unable to remember the violence and the economic panic of this crackdown? Or, in fact, any of the other even more violent episodes in the sixty-plus-year history of Chinese Communist Party rule?

Some of the story may initially seem to follow a familiar theme: two people suddenly meet again, some twenty years after a period when they were spending a great deal of time together, which for them was in the liberal days of the mid- to late 1980s. At that time the male protagonist, Lao Chen, had been attracted to Little Xi, but nothing ever really happened between them. When he meets her again, he is once more intrigued by her, but she doesn’t trust anyone who trusts the party-state regime. Chen’s pursuit of Little Xi leads us through both the very significant underground Christian movement and a land-rights protection campaign that demonstrates the flexibility of local Party officials.

The realistic exposé, with only one or two exaggerations, reveals the Chinese Communist party-state control system, and the Chinese Communist Party’s plans to replace the United States as the most dominant superpower in the world.

The original title of the book could be literally translated as “China in the Ascendant,” and the novel is indeed primarily concerned with that subject. The main theme is that China is yet another “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” and what that may mean for the world and the Chinese people. This theme is in
basic agreement with recent works of nonfiction, and also dovetails with many proposals by young ultranationalist Chinese and high officers in the Chinese armed forces who champion what can only be labeled as fascist ideas. It also reflects several recent warnings by old retired Party leaders who fear these ultranationalists and how they want China to develop.

Unlike a work of nonfiction, however edifying,
The Fat Years
gives you a full taste of what it feels like to be one of the characters living in the “counterfeit paradise” that is China today. In its original form it was circulated throughout China among concerned Chinese intellectuals, students, and so on, jumping the Great Firewall of censorship. Probably many high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have read it. The Chinese scholars who sent the novel to my wife, and many other Chinese intellectuals we’ve talked to, have all said that this book is “the best description of the way they live today.” I believe it is destined to become a classic in China in the
Brave New World
rather than the
1984
tradition. Less futuristic than
Brave New World,
the book is still prophetic and will long be relevant to our understanding of a modern dictatorship of the kind that exists in China today.

In the realism of the novel’s character depictions, we meet a very wide spectrum of almost all the elements of China’s three hundred to four hundred million urban population. They include ultra-nationalist wannabe fascist students, professors, and Party officials (Wei Guo, Professors X, Y, & Z); “ordinary” professors, members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who conduct “ordinary” research (Hu Yan); well-heeled real estate moguls (Jian Lin) and high-ranking officials in the party-state apparatus to whom they are firmly tied by interest and blood relationships (He Dongsheng); editors, writers, and media types (Zhuang Zizhong and unnamed
Reading Journal
contributors); sons and daughters of “Red Aristocrats”—longtime loyal Party families—who serve the party-state’s interests at home and around the world (Ban Cuntou, Wen Lan); young people of the lumpen proletariat, some of them escapees from slave-labor camps (Zhang Dou); other young professionals who have dropped out of the state-controlled media (Miaomiao); leaders and their followers in the rapidly growing underground Christian movement (Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun); young and old netizens who argue for and against ultranationalism and government policies; foreigners who like Lao Chen have opted to live the good life in a communist dictatorship because it is a good life for them and it does not frighten them; high-priced female escorts and drug addicts who work in places with names like the Paradise Club, catering to the newly rich, the Party powerful, and foreigners (Dong Niang and her boyfriend); youthful dissidents who protested and then escaped abroad or went silent after the Tiananmen Massacre (Shi Ping); and, finally, professional dissidents like Little Xi who refuse to accept the party-state’s version of past, present, and future reality; she is joined by the older, more experienced peripatetic cook and small-time entrepreneur Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou, the young escapee from slave labor.

A number of groups are, however, missing from
The Fat Years.
From the urban population, these are the many professors, lawyers, and other professionals who are actively working to change the dictatorship. Also missing are the urban working class and peasant workers (migrant laborers) who toil in the harsh working conditions of mostly foreign-owned factories (owned by American, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong Kong consortia), and who by 2010 acquired the unfortunate habit of committing suicide as a way out of their misery. Missing also are the other eight hundred to nine hundred million Chinese who live in rural China. Although, as the fictional CASS scholar Hu Yan says, their aggregate income has indeed increased in the last thirty-two years, they are certainly not enjoying the “fat years” that some, but not all, Chinese urbanites enjoy. Missing, too, except for Wei Guo’s ineffectual fascist cell, are any detailed descriptions of the special People’s Armed Police, the military, and the thugs who maintain the party-state’s stability by routinely harassing anyone who balks at having his or her house demolished, or farmland stolen as part of party-state real estate deals, or who calls for any sort of liberal democratic reforms, including genuine implementation of the existing constitution of the People’s Republic of China.

Many people interpret the China of this novel as a dystopia, but I do not believe it presents China as a dystopia. Dystopia is thought of as
“an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one, the opposite of utopia.” That is an accurate description of the state presented in Orwell’s classic dystopian novel
1984
that was modeled on Stalinist Russia. It would also describe China under Mao Zedong, especially from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, 1956 to 1976. The former occasioned the greatest man-made famine ever in world history in which some forty-five million people perished, and totally destroyed almost every aspect of China’s social, cultural, economic, and environmental infrastructure; the latter did more or less the same, except for the famine; fatalities in the Cultural Revolution were usually the result of intellectuals and teachers being beaten to death by young Red Guards, suicide, murder, or civil warfare.

China today and for the foreseeable future is not a dystopia, nor is it a utopia; it’s not even trying to be a utopia. It is a Leviathan-like Leninist party-state that is, by the Chinese Communist Party’s standards, a great success, a putatively “harmonious society” that aims to give everyone a “moderately decent standard of living.” Some people call it a fascist state, but if it is, it is a truly successful fascist state. A fascist state, however, has to have an ardent ideology and a Great Leader, but China today has neither. The semifascist ultranationalists, like Wei Guo in the novel, are a minority, and their passion does not extend to the nine men of the Politburo Standing Committee who actually govern China—Party Central, represented in the novel by one of its secretaries, He Dongsheng.

China is a party-state in which the Communist Party is both the state and the government and controls every institution in the society. Since 1979, the Chinese Communist Party has achieved tremendous economic successes by abandoning any residual socialist or communist ideals, and by becoming the director of a capitalist economy without the rule of law, a capitalist society claiming to be a dictatorship of the proletariat that rules for the people and in their interests. With the Communist Party at the center of everything, this modern Leviathan works by attracting direct foreign investment, selling to foreign consumers, and buying off most of the professional urban class, and many of the peasants, while brutally suppressing any dissent and treating the entire population as a “reserve army” that labors for the benefit of the Communist Party and its party-state apparatus.

The Party leaders have no dream of utopia, only a dream of amassing more wealth and power for themselves and their dependents while suppressing all malcontents in the name of national stability. In this, they still resemble O’Brien’s Party mentioned in Professor Lovell’s Preface.
In a recent interview, CASS professor Yu Jianrong, an outspoken advocate of individual rights, makes an interesting comparison between the “stability” of Taiwan and that of China. His comments on the two different kinds of “stability” are that, in his view, “when judging stability in Taiwan the criterion” is “whether or not the situation will influence the stability of the law,” while the standard for judging stability on the mainland is mainly “whether or not the situation will influence the stability of the Chinese Communist Party regime … In order to consolidate its regime, the Chinese Communist Party views every action that might remove their pressure on the people to be a destabilizing element … In order to eliminate all the destabilizing elements, the Chinese Communist Party then continuously practices suppression, i.e., takes suppression for stability … I believe that the core belief of the Chinese Communist Party is not economic development. There is only one goal of everything it does: the exclusiveness of its political power. Without realizing this, one cannot really understand the Chinese Communist Party … It has long since become a party without belief, a party of pragmatism. The only thing that will influence it is the pressure of reality.”

The only vision the Chinese Communist Party has is the overall vision of coming world hegemony, related in
The Fat Years
through He Dongsheng’s lengthy monologue. Some readers may regard this as a tedious “soap box monologue” lacking in drama, but they would be mistaken. Most liberal ethnic-Chinese scholars living in China and abroad regard the last section of the work as very dramatic and the most important part of the book. Important both in He Dongsheng’s manner of delivery, and in the content of his monologue.

The way He Dongsheng talks to, or rather lectures at, his kidnappers is exactly the way the Party leadership talks to the 1.3 billion Chinese. It is how “President” Hu Jintao addresses the ordinary people, while Premier Wen Jiabao seems to have tried to imitate the so-called populism of Mao’s behind-the-scenes hatchet man Zhou Enlai (a performance that has been criticized by the dissident Yu Jie, in a book published this year in Hong Kong). Several Chinese intellectuals and reporters from the popular liberal paper
Southern Weekly
(itself mentioned in the novel) who visited Taiwan in November 2010 witnessed the way President Ma Ying-jeou interacted with the ordinary people and with other officials. Then they publicly lamented the fact that no dialogue of that sort could possibly take place in the People’s Republic.

Reality has already caught up with He Dongsheng’s monologue, and many of the plans he describes have already been fulfilled, especially China’s buying up of much of the world’s natural resources to fuel its economic behemoth. Everything else, except for the genuine fantasy of an alliance with Japan, is in preparation or in progress. All these plans are intended to fulfill the goals of a China that its leaders and many of its people believe is in ascendance and destined to become the main power in the world.

This idea that the U.S.-led West is suffering an unstoppable decline while China is enjoying an unstoppable rise is why in 2010 Chinese foreign policy became exceedingly aggressive and, as a result,
China antagonized much of the world and drove all its neighbors either to increase their defense budgets or seek a rapprochement with the United States for protection. As political commentator Stephen Hill points out,
“Beyond economic and ecological indicators, the hallmark of a great power is when other nations want to emulate you … But no one is banging down doors to get into China, and only the poorest countries aim to be like the People’s Republic.” Some nonpolitical Chinese scholars do return to China to work, even after obtaining their getaway pass in the form of permanent residency or citizenship in the United States or some other democratic country; while most of the poor nations that want to follow the Beijing model of development are ruled by unscrupulous dictators out for the main chance.

Further evidence of the realism and relevance of this novel has just appeared. As I write these pages, two autocratic regimes have fallen in the Middle East due to popular protests, and some others are in danger of falling. The
reaction of the Chinese Communist party-state was to mandate a ban on independent media reports on the Middle East and on any local disturbances; the government called for increased control of the Internet, cell phone messages, Twitter, and microblogs, and made preparations for a complete Internet shutdown; it also stepped up police detention and harassment of all known democracy advocates. This is all of a piece with their treatment of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, whose wife is presently under house arrest.