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By Root 1198 0

—I’d been plotting a novel about China for some time, but that gave me a moment, a focus. That year, as the West reeled from the financial mess while China escaped unscathed, it seemed that everyone—from officials down to ordinary urbanites—began to feel that China was doing well for itself, that there was nothing more to learn from the West, that China can argue back … The public have now bought enthusiastically into China’s authoritarian model.” The construction of an authoritarian harmony has always been implicit in communist theory and practice, but this became official policy after 2007, when President Hu Jintao exhorted “all people [to] coexist harmoniously, love and help each other, encourage each other, and make an effort to contribute to the building of a harmonious society.”

In recent years, China’s communist government has indeed succeeded—perhaps beyond its wildest dreams—in muffling critical voices. The 1980s were choppy times for the regime, as China’s chattering classes debated the disasters of Maoism, and whether there was any place for Marxism in economic and political liberalization. As China stumbled toward a market economy and as inflation rocketed throughout the decade, the conviction grew that the government’s reforms weren’t working and the leadership had not persuaded the populace that they could lead. The most avant-garde rebels—such as the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo—speculated that China could experience “great historical change” only if it had been colonized like Hong Kong was after the Opium War of 1839–42. (“China is so big,” he added as a provocative after-thought, “that naturally it would need three hundred years of colonization to become like Hong Kong.”) From the middecade onward, urban China was given pause, every year, by student protests—over the lack of government transparency; over the rising cost of food; over the rats in their dorms—culminating in the two-month occupation of Tiananmen Square from April to June 1989. The demonstrations’ bloody denouement was an international and domestic PR disaster for China’s communist government: while Western politicians and overseas Chinese called for economic and political sanctions, hundreds of thousands of sobbing Chinese people came out in protest in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Western cities, comparing the People’s Republic to Nazi Germany and spray-painting the national flag with swastikas.

Fast-forward to the present day, and China’s communist rulers have effectively neutralized many of their former opponents. “For years,” as one analyst has observed, “the Beijing regime has stayed in power using a basic bargain with its citizens—tolerate our authoritarian rule and we’ll make you rich.” Confounding Western prophets of communist apocalypse, China’s post-1989 leaders accelerated economic reforms, while backpedaling on political liberalization. In China 2011, as in The Fat Years, much of the urban population seems to have tacitly agreed to forget past political violence, and to concentrate on enjoying the fat times of the here-and-now. Not only sharp businessmen, but also many of China’s writers and thinkers have benefited, enjoying generous research grants, conference budgets, and travel opportunities, as long as they do not break taboos on open discussion of issues such as official abuse of power, the need for political reforms, human rights abuses against critics of the regime, ethnic tensions (especially in Xinjiang or Tibet), and widespread censorship. This unspoken consensus also demands public amnesia about communist-manufactured cataclysms: in particular, the man-made disasters of the Maoist era (the brutal excesses of Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution) and, of course, the bloodletting of 1989. “Many of those who were once critical of the regime are now part of the system,” Chan Koonchung has observed. “The Party has absorbed the elites by handing out funding, positions, and employment. Those in universities are getting government projects so they don’t want to be vocal. Many people depend on