The Fat Years Read Free

novel summarized their basic difficulties and plan … And ordinary readers seemed quite happy that a former radical from the 1980s like Little Xi was marginalized as she was—they thought that was fine. Many mainland readers felt that cracking down with martial law was fine, too—that it was an appropriate response to civil chaos.”
    But
The Fat Years’
power to unsettle goes beyond its uncomfortable proximity to reality. It sketches a credible likeness of China, then pushes it a touch beyond credibility. Chan’s China is self-satisfied to an uncanny degree. “Now everybody’s saying there’s no country in the world as good as China,” Chan’s hero remarks early in the book, noting “so many celebrated members of the intellectual elite … harmoniously gathered together in one place looking genuinely happy, even euphoric … This really must be a true age of peace and prosperity … Every day I read the papers, surfed the net, and watched the TV news, and every day I congratulated myself on living in China; sometimes I was moved to tears I felt so blessed.” The puzzle of Chan’s blissed-out China is unraveled only at the end of the book. This fictional China is also intellectually repressive and conformist way beyond contemporary standards. Although for well over a decade, for example, the Chinese government has been one of the world’s most assiduous censors of the web, in reality the Chinese Internet still seethes with potential dissent and capacity to organize against the regime, with a lawyer like Teng Biao only one representative of China’s awkward squad. At one point in the novel, Chen tries to find a restrained satire of intellectual life under Maoism, Yang Jiang’s
Baptism,
which is at present easily found in Beijing; the assistant in the bookshop tells him that not only is it not available in that bookshop, but that officially it does not exist—all digital record of the book has disappeared. Chan’s fictional regime has, moreover, apparently erased from mass memory a whole, brutal month of government violence and civil war from just two years earlier. (Although public discussion of the bloodletting of 1989 is impossible in contemporary China, it assuredly lives on in private memory.) Chan Koonchung’s dystopian China of 2013 represents a degraded version of a recognizable state: the iron fist of a harsh, Leninist dictatorship lying inside the utopian velvet glove of communism. To one mainland blogger, the novel seemed both “extremely realistic” and an allegory of “everyone’s common fate. [It] painfully describes the fears that lie deep in our hearts, [convincing us] that the world described in the book is quickly bearing down on us.”
    Although the autocracy of
The Fat Years
is less shockingly brutal than Orwell’s Ingsoc in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
the restrained plausibility of Chan’s dystopia brings with it a clear warning about China’s possible near future. Nearing the end of his torture by O’Brien, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith asks his captor why the Party seeks power, expecting some self-loving sentiment about dictatorship being for “the good of the people.” His persecutor has no such illusions: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” He Dongsheng, the representative of the communist leadership in
The Fat Years
who finally reveals the government’s grand scheme “for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World,” is an altogether softer dictator, whose policies—like those of China’s government today—rely more heavily on the active agreement of his Chinese subjects. The China that he has created, he believes, is “the best option in the real world”: “there is no possible way for China to be any better than it is