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By Root 1192 0

by its descriptions of collective amnesia and compromise with the regime, and of the fascism implicit in China’s brave new world. “It’s a long time since I read anything that made me think so much,” wrote a reader. “I almost forgot that it was science fiction,” admitted another. “It’s more like a documentary.” “Now we know what China’s near future will be like,” observed one blogger, while chic party hostesses slipped copies of the book into guests’ take-home bags. “Starting from today,” decided one journalist after finishing the novel, “I have no friends and I have no enemies. I now divide people into two categories—those who have read The Fat Years and those who haven’t.” “The book is hot,” a publisher anonymously declared, noting the resonances between Chen’s fictional diagnosis of China’s political landscape and recent headline controversies such as the eleven-year sentence handed down to Liu Xiaobo in 2009 after his calls for constitutional human rights, or Google’s 2010 confrontation with government censorship. “It’s very clear that things are getting harsher and harsher.” Others again read it as utopia, rather than dystopia. “If only China could be just like this!” sighed another blogger. “It would be wonderful.” Chan reported that officials at the very pinnacle of China’s political hierarchy had told him that “the political situation in the 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