The Fat Years Read Free Page A

today … Can China be controlled without a one-party dictatorship? Can any other system feed and clothe one billion, three hundred and fifty million people? Or successfully administer an ‘Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis’? … there
must not be
[democratic] reform because any reform would lead to chaos.” In
The Fat Years,
rulers and the ruled are locked in collusive harmony. Did the Office of Stability Maintenance, Fang Caodi asks, inject everyone with a drug created “to make us all forget” the terrifying month of martial law imposed in 2011 during which many more will have died at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army than perished in the notorious suppression of 1989? “It would be wonderful if we did have one,” He Dongsheng wistfully responds. “Then our Communist Party could rewrite its history any way it wanted to … If you ask me for the real reason [why everyone forgot], I can only tell you that I don’t know! You shouldn’t think that we can control everything.” The Chinese of
The Fat Years
have, according to the logic of the novel, the rulers that they deserve: they have deliberately chosen to forget. “The people fear chaos more than they fear dictatorship,” He Dongsheng summarizes. “The vast majority of the Chinese people crave stability.”
    Chan Koonchung has himself felt the ambivalent pull of the contemporary “Chinese model.” The son of refugees from Maoist China, product of Hong Kong’s Anglicized education system, he is an unlikely sympathizer with authoritarian methods. “I grew up listening to the Beatles, watching French films, reading Camus, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,” he recalled. “My friends and I would have worn black polo-necks, but we couldn’t get hold of any in subtropical Hong Kong, so we had to make do with white T-shirts instead.” But the open-ended questions he scatters through the book express his own uncertain position vis-à-vis contemporary Chinese politics. “Between a good hell and a fake paradise—which one would
you
choose?” Little Xi demands of Chen at one point. He has just said to her that “no matter what you might say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise is better than a good hell … But there’s always a small number of people, even if they are only an extremely small minority, who will choose the good hell no matter how painful it is, because in the good hell at least everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell.” Outside the book Chan is selectively critical about China’s capacity for mass amnesia: “This is a place where memories get terribly distorted: people in their fifties now say that the government was right to crack down in 1989. And many people forget that 1989–92 was an ice age, before China began marching toward the market. I don’t think ordinary people should have to concentrate on remembering—it’s not good for them, and it’s not their job. It’s intellectuals who shouldn’t forget. These days, they can’t say anything, though. They know the risks of speaking out: that there’s a huge difference between having government approval and losing it, in terms of the housing you’ll get, access to international funding, and so on.” Chan is even able to see the pluses of He Dongsheng’s “Action Plan for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World.” “I saw the economic crisis of the novel as the government’s great opportunity to take control. That was the best way that things could have worked out; mine was the most optimistic scenario.”
    Both Chan Koonchung and his fictional namesake in
The Fat Years
voted with their feet by moving to Beijing from Hong Kong a few years ago; both are, to an extent, seduced by the lure of a rising China: “This place is too fascinating to ignore,” Chan confesses. “The Beijing I described in
The Fat Years
is basically the Beijing in which I live. There’s