Ma Jian (馬建) walked into his interview at a Hong Kong hotel carrying a local newspaper under his arm after finding himself at the center of a media storm.
Two venues refused to host talks the exiled Chinese author was due to give at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, before the original space changed its mind and invited him back.
The row made local and international headlines and tapped into fears that Hong Kong is losing its freedoms as Beijing’s influence grows.
While he describes himself as a novelist, not a politician, Ma did not shy away from the fact that his works are deeply political.
“Literature includes all subjects: philosophy, psychology, physiology — how could it not include politics?” he said. “Literature needs to reveal the weakness of politics and its dark side to help push society forward.”
His latest novel, China Dream, plays on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) rhetoric of national rejuvenation. It depicts the disintegration of the director of a fictitious “China Dream Bureau” who is haunted by nightmares of his past.
Ma said he wanted to portray a world where individual thoughts and memories are being erased to serve a totalitarian regime.
He believes the Chinese government is trying to create a “Communist utopia” that tries to rub out horrors, including mass famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
“The [regime] won’t let you see the ruthless, bloody truth,” Ma said, adding that Uighur education camps are the latest hidden crisis. “All the nightmares are covered up. I have to tell a truth — if we ignore or forget history, then history will repeat itself constantly.”
Ma grew up during the Cultural Revolution and said he was struck by the suicides of writers.
“If writers from the present forget the price paid by those writers, then we do not inherit anything from their death,” he said.
Like his other dark, satirical works, all set in China, his latest book depicts its characters’ troubled relationship with their own memories.
However, unlike his previous novels, Ma said he found creating the central figure, Ma Daode (馬道德), a disturbing process.
“It was really unpleasant to live with a character you dislike for two years. You need to find the evil and ugly side of him,” he said.
He wants the book to be compared with Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, to whom he dedicates the novel.
“When I wrote this book, I constantly read Nineteen Eighty-Four,” he said. “I want to pay tribute to him because the harm a totalitarian society can do, as predicted in his book, is becoming a reality in China day by day.”
Ma grew up in the northern province of Shandong and worked as a painter and a photojournalist in Beijing in the 1980s, but life changed after his first novel Stick Out Your Tongue in 1987, which told of a young Chinese journalist’s travels to Tibet.
It was labeled by Beijing as “spiritual pollution” — Ma became a banned author and fled to Hong Kong before settling in London.
Ma has not been back to China since six years ago, when he was granted special permission to attend his mother’s funeral.
Subsequent visa requests to visit his hometown have been denied. His brother and sister still live in China and come to see him in the UK, he said.
He remembered Hong Kong as a “lighthouse of freedom.”
“We thought Hong Kong could gradually change China,” he said.
He spent 10 years there before leaving in 1997, when Britain handed it back to China. During that time Ma dipped his toe into Hong Kong’s then-thriving banned books industry, setting up a publishing house that focused on illicit titles which folded after two years.
The industry continued apace until 2015, when five booksellers known for printing gossipy titles about China’s leaders disappeared and resurfaced in custody in China.
Since then Hong Kong bookshops selling banned books have closed and chain stores have removed them from their shelves.
Ma said he was “shocked” at the treatment of the five booksellers. He has been unable to find a Hong Kong publisher for the Chinese-language version of his new book, a first for his titles.
Ma believes authorities are afraid of culture and literature, which might force the arts to go underground in Hong Kong.
“They are afraid that people have critical thinking, that people will develop a different mind-set to Xi Jinping,” he said.
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