In the midst of an unusually sweeping government campaign against artistic dissent, he has published a novel that predicts an Orwellian future for China in just two years. The novel, needless to say, has been banned. Imported copies have been seized at the border. Booksellers who manage to secure some copies for sale have been shut down.
And yet Chan Koonchung (陳冠中) isn’t packing his bags to return to his native Hong Kong. Instead, he’s hunkered down for the long haul, convinced that Beijing is the only place in China worth living.
“You never use the word ‘lovely’ to describe Beijing,” Chan said in an upscale restaurant not far from his high-end apartment. “But I need to be in Beijing because of the people.”
IllustrationL Yusha
For much of his career, that would have meant the beautiful people.
Chan, 59, is best known for founding a lifestyle magazine in Hong Kong, City Magazine, and starting up a “lite-fare” cable television station in Taiwan, Super TV, which he sold to Sony Entertainment in the 1990s. More recently, he’s made a name for himself writing cultural essays on Chinese cities.
“He’s very much circulating on the party circuit,” says Huang Hung (洪晃), a Beijing publisher and social commentator. “That’s why this work comes as a little bit of a surprise, but it’s a terribly nice surprise.”
The work is a dystopian novel of China in the near future. After the world’s second financial crisis in 2013, the government clings to power only after it sends troops into the streets for a month of bloody killing. Finally, the government laces the water with a chemical that makes people feel happy and eager to spend money.
With China’s consumers finally unleashed from their age-old habit of saving, the country’s economy booms and it leaps past the US and other Western countries. A golden age dawns.
Mostly, though, it’s a book about living in an authoritarian state. In what is probably the most damning part of the novel, the month of killing is forgotten, not through drugs but an act of collective amnesia. The book’s nominal heroes, the country’s Westernized elite, finally figure out what has happened (by kidnapping a politburo member and forcing him to tell all), but they end up agreeing with the government’s measures.
“This is one of the major untalked-about issues,” says Hung, who has championed the book on her popular microblog. “They want to drink the Chinese government’s Kool-Aid.”
The book is known in Chinese as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (盛世：中國 2013), which can be translated as “China’s Golden Age 2013.” It has just been published in the UK as The Fat Years and is due out in the US early next year.
Chan says forgetfulness is a fact of life in China. The government pushes certain historical memories to legitimize its rule, but quashes other traumas.
“We’re still talking about the Opium War, but we forgot about the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution,” he says.
He decided to write the novel in 2008, when he noticed a shift among the elite. China’s rise seemed to be crowned by Beijing hosting the Olympics, while the West’s problems, which many in China now view as a permanent decline, was highlighted by the financial crisis.
“A lot of people realized that China did something right and they want to express it,” Chan said.
He wrote the book in 2009 and it was published in Hong Kong and Taiwan at the end of that year. Chinese publishers declined to publish it.
“Some were interested and I told them to read it first. They did and never came back,” he said.
However, by last year it was circulating on the Internet, something like the old samizdat system of passing along bootleg copies in the Soviet Union. China uses a simplified writing system compared to the traditional system used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but some people retyped the book in simplified form.
Chan said he noticed that these copies had many errors. So he fixed them and made his version available online, essentially pirating his own book. Over the past year, it has become a sensation, probably the most widely discussed book in China’s big cities.
However, it is very much an underground phenomenon. After banning its import and taking steps to punish book dealers who try to sell it, the authorities have now blocked all sites that offer free downloads of the book, including Chan’s authorized site.
Chan remains a convinced Beijingophile, a rarity for people from Hong Kong.
“Coming from Hong Kong, I had a Shanghai complex: Shanghai movies, Shanghai fashion,” he said.
He also loved living in Taipei, which he says is the most livable city in “greater China.”
He quickly realized, however, that if he wanted to be in touch with what is going on in China he had to be in Beijing.
“At dinner people talk about serious things,” Chan said. “They want to make sense of China.”
Chan has become a fixture of Beijing’s social scene. He is tall and thin, his shoulder-length hair and chic rectangular glasses making him look younger than his 59 years. He dresses ascetically but with flair: tight trousers, a dress shirt buttoned up and a narrow-lapelled jacket. The look is almost designed to say: I am not from here.
However, he does fit into the city rather well. By Hong Kong standards Chan’s Mandarin Chinese is remarkably good, something he attributes to having been born in the coastal city of Ningbo, even if he did move to Hong Kong when he was just four years old.
He still travels widely abroad, but is intensely interested in the thick political gossip that swirls through China.
“I like to know what’s going on, or at least what people think is going on,” Chan says.
That led him to start an e-mail discussion group on civil society in China that helps him stay in touch with people involved in the law and protecting the environment, among other fields that often attract scrutiny from the authorities. All this means he wants to stay in the capital, despite the risks.
Over the past few months, the artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) has been silenced after being arrested and then placed under house arrest. Author Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) has fled into exile, declaring it too risky to continue publishing his books on society’s marginal figures.
Chan, however, says he doesn’t feel at risk. He has a Hong Kong passport, which he thinks might help. Against many predictions, China has treated Hong Kong leniently since taking it over in 1997 and tolerates dissent there that never would be allowed in the rest of the country. Or it could be that he simply hasn’t yet gotten on a blacklist. Once on, he says, and every crackdown results in harassment or detention.
“In China, whether you’re a dissident or not is up to the state,” he said. “You are on the receiving end; it is imposed on you. But I’ve never been labeled a dissident.”
In any case, he says, being a dissident doesn’t mean being the outlier of times past.
“Their values are shared by many people now. More people now will say: ‘I have rights.’ That wouldn’t have happened 30 years ago,” he said.
Chan is somewhat fatalistic about the prospects for trouble.
“It is like playing with a cat. You never know when its claws will come out,” he said.
So for now, he says, he remains committed to Beijing and writing a new novel. The source of his material?
“I go to a lot of dinners,” he said.
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