Masters of Subservience: China’s ‘Bureaucracy Lit’
At The New York Times, NPR’s Louisa Lim examines China’s popular ‘bureaucracy lit’, focusing on former official Wang Xiaofang’s Civil Servant’s Notebook. The genre has recently attracted increased attention from censors, but the difficulty of keeping pace with reality ma ...
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To a villager, all politics are strictly local, especially in China, with its vast distances. The capital is far away.
This village attitude is the same almost in all the Asian countries – even in Pakistan villagers are hardly concerned with the urban politics.
Yet Mo Yan has risen far higher in the Party’s cultural bureaucracy than anybody else in his entire province: Vice Chair of the Party-supervised Chinese Writers’ Association. For a long time, he has hardly been an ordinary villager or “peasant,” to use that anachronistic term so many journalists and academics seem unable to relinquish, no matter how poorly it meshes with the realities of China over the past 2000 years.
Some like Buruma find Mo Yan’s tall tales giddily entertaining, while others find them mostly rather crude and predictable once you have read the first several pages of the latest yarn.