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By Root 1199 0

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