Thomas Wieck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMa Jian in 2009.LONDON — Meet Ma Jian: Chinese novelist-in-exile and apparently the designated explainer of Chinese literature for foreign observers. For years now Ma Jian has provided Western journalists with a firm moral footing from which to consider the hazy issue of freedom of speech in China.
Ma Jian speaks in familiar terms of courage, conscience and integrity, accusing writers within China of cowardice. In a 2008 article for The New York Times, he wrote that “they refuse to admit their complicity with the repressive political system.” He appeared most recently, in mid-April, in the media flurry surrounding the London Book Fair, during which the choice of China as this year’s “Market Focus” country was described as “importing censorship” and the Chinese writers in the official delegation were decried as party hacks.
Commenters have borrowed Ma Jian in writing vigorous — sometimes caustic — attacks on the Chinese government. And even those inclined to feel sympathy toward Chinese authors seem disappointed that they’re not pushing harder. Everyone seems to be waiting for the writers to speak with the kind of courage and moral clarity displayed by political dissidents like Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng. What’s holding them back? Asked directly, most will say that they have perfect freedom to write but imperfect freedom to publish — namely, that self-censorship is not an issue.
I don’t believe this for an instant.
Since 2005 or so I’ve worked as a translator and promoter of Chinese literature, and — to borrow the grand language of the London Book Fair — I’ve generally adopted a “strategy of engagement” toward Chinese writers. What this means is that for several years I tried coaxing writers into confessing to me how oppressed they felt, perhaps with the aim of encouraging them to buck up somehow.
This went over poorly. While a few agreed boisterously with my arguments, usually over beer or baijiu, most just squinted at me or let their eyes wander, then changed the subject. Others, even though I was sure they shared my point of view, would lean back and smile Sphinx-like at the ceiling. Eventually I embarrassed myself enough to give it up.
Over time, I’ve come to think it isn’t courage that Chinese writers lack. From 1949 to 1989, the first 40 years of the modern Chinese state, plenty of them spoke their minds and suffered for it. Post-1989, however, the government has made it very clear that writers (along with most of civil society) were no longer welcome to participate directly in resolving the Grand Questions of the Nation. Literature was pushed back into what might be considered its traditional role: not to launch polemics against specific injustices, but to come at problems obliquely — feeling for root causes, working in metaphor. It’s an approach more conducive to understanding than condemnation, more apt to sorrow than outrage and more likely to lead inward than outward.
This inward movement seems to have proved corrosive. The writers of the 1950s and 1960s may have been persecuted politically, but the last three decades are littered with examples of incisive authors who persecuted themselves. Wang Xiaobo died of a heart attack at the age of 45. Wang Shuo descended into dissipation. Gouzi turned to the bottle. Zhu Wen stopped writing altogether.
Yan Lianke is the rare Chinese author who is exerting all his powers to illustrate the illnesses of Chinese society while himself remaining a part of it. His portrait of AIDS villages in Henan is just as damning of the stricken villagers as it is of the officials who preyed on them. The stress visible in his face, however, is caused by something more than just tackling politically sensitive subjects. It is the result of pushing into territory where almost no one — not readers, not censors, not even other writers — wants him to go.
And why not? Perhaps it has to do with shame — shame of a specific historical kind. After a century of humiliation at the hands of outsiders, China finally regained self-determination in 1949, only to almost immediately plunge itself into a 30-year nightmare that caused more deaths and damage than anything ever inflicted by foreigners. The trauma of that period has been deeply buried, particularly since 1989. The collective belief that the Chinese people’s relationship to their government today is somehow normal — that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were simply the growing pains of a new nation — might be the defining fiction of modern Chinese society.
Call it shame, call it mass Stockholm Syndrome, but this cognitive dissonance appears to be a far more potent poison than mere censorship. Whether or not I’m right about this, it’s not a conversation Chinese writers are prepared to enter into.
Eric Abrahamsen is a literary translator and publishing consultant.
