If the central government’s decrees are opaque, local authorities’ can be downright ridiculous. In 2001, hospital officials in the southern city of Shenzhen specified that nurses should show precisely eight teeth when smiling. In 2003, Hunan Province, in central China, stipulated that the breasts of female candidates for civil-service positions should be symmetrical. The next year, public safety officials in the northern city of Harbin ruled that policemen whose waistlines exceeded 36 inches had to go. In 2006, transportation officials in Zhejiang Province, just south of Shanghai, banned employees from sporting facial hair. The following year, in an effort to reduce the school-dropout rate, Pinghe County in Fujian Province, on the southeast coast, decreed that a junior high school diploma was required to marry.

Several of these rules have since been revoked, but their wacky and arbitrary nature demonstrates the arrogance of power in China. One can imagine all too easily their creators — sitting in comfortable armchairs, drinking high-grade tea and smoking fine cigarettes — discussing the issues at hand as if they were purely intellectual abstractions, never considering how ordinary people might react. That people will be unhappy is no cause for concern because, for so long, the power of the state has trampled on individual rights. Only when rules are so onerous that they stir actual protest do higher-ups take notice: “You guys are just making a mess of things,” they’ll tell their bureaucrat underlings. “This is not good for social stability.” The rules are then quietly rescinded — sometimes.

[Source]

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Post tags: abuse of power, government, regulations, transparency, yu hua
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A district chief in a southern Chinese city told me this story: Heavy rains had triggered a flood that swept away over a thousand graves, affecting more than 10,000 people. The Chinese have a deep-seated belief that the state of one’s ancestors’ graves determines one’s own fate. To accommodate urbanization, these thousand-odd graves, originally dispersed over a variety of locations, had been shifted and placed next to one another — a process that was itself contradictory, because according to tradition, graves are not to be moved, lest later generations suffer some calamity.

[...] Instead of mobilizing the police, however, the canny district chief summoned a dozen or so practitioners of feng shui. They calmed the protesters, assuring them that when the graves were swept away it signified a fortune in the making. As folk wisdom has it, water is wealth — and an encounter with water means you will get rich. The protesters didn’t trust the government, but they did trust the feng shui masters.

Here’s another story, told to me by a former county official in Hunan Province, in central China. Consignments of timber, concrete and reinforcing rods were piled on a vacant lot to prepare for the building of a government office block. Every evening, local residents would sneak over and help themselves to construction materials, planning to use them for their own projects. In their eyes, stealing property from the government didn’t count as theft, unlike, say, stealing from your neighbor. County officials proposed security measures: a perimeter wall topped by an electrified fence, and regular police patrols.

No need for any of that, the county leader told them. His solution: wooden signs posted on all four sides. “For temple construction,” the signs read. This did the trick: when the locals saw that the timber, steel and concrete were going to be used to build a Buddhist temple, not only did they stop their pilfering, but under cover of darkness they even returned the loot they had carted home. Theft of temple property, superstition told them, would incur terrible retribution.

See more on Yu Hua via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: local officials, superstition, tombs, traditional culture, yu hua
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The West constantly, and often justly, criticizes the Chinese government for sitting on its hands as movies, songs, books and luxury goods are counterfeited and sold. But a more apt metaphor might be to say that its hands are tied. In the West, piracy is a matter of intellectual property — copyright, patents and trademarks — but in China, the issue is not just legal, but social.

Why are fake goods everywhere? The administrator suggested part of the reason: businesses producing pirated and knockoff goods have intricate connections to local governments and officials. These enterprises are, plainly, major sources of tax revenue; less visibly, some officials have an economic stake in them.

But the most basic reason, in my view, is the huge demand for pirated and knockoff products. After more than 30 years of rapid economic development that made China the world’s second largest economy, there are still more than 100 million Chinese, mostly peasants, who make less than $1 a day. Food and housing prices have been rising, creating an enormous market for counterfeit items among those without money. They can’t afford genuine, guaranteed-quality products and can buy only cheap, counterfeit goods. They live surrounded by contaminated rice, adulterated milk powder, tainted vegetables, spoiled ham, unsafe toys, even fake eggs. Day after day, year after year, they consume substandard food and rely on defective supplies. Reading offers a means to improve their condition, and low-cost, pirated books are the only ones they can afford.

Also on Wednesday, police in the Gansu city of Lanzhou seized 20,000 pirated books in its largest such raid this year, according to the People’s Daily.

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Post tags: intellectual property rights, piracy, social mobility, yu hua
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On Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter, I recently made a joking comparison between media censorship and the pervasive threat of contaminated food, a constant source of worry:

“There’s no end to these food scares,” a friend sighed. “Is there any hope of a solution?”

“Oh, all we need is for food inspections to be as forceful as film censorship,” I told him breezily. “With all that faultfinding and nit-picking, food-safety issues will be resolved in no time.”

More than 12,000 readers reposted this. One wrote: I know what we should do. Let’s have those in charge of film, newspaper and book censorship take over food safety, and have those responsible for food safety censor films, papers and books. That way we’ll have food safety — and freedom of expression as well!

The unpredictable whims of film censors at the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television have been blamed for wrecking China’s Oscar chances, and even state media have carried calls for a more consistent and codified approach. SARFT has been extending its reach to cover online video and require pre-vetting of TV documentaries, however, and Hollywood productions increasingly subject themselves to its censorship in exchange for access to Chinese funding and theaters. Meanwhile, the country has witnessed a seemingly endless stream of food safety problems, most recently cadmium-tainted rice.

Yu’s op-ed was translated by Allan H. Barr, who commented on his translations of Yu Hua and Han Han in an interview at Pomona College’s website (via CDT) in December. See more on Yu Hua via CDT.

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Post tags: books, censorship, film censorship, food safety, literature, media censorship, news media, newspapers, SARFT, tainted food, TV, weibo, yu hua
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In China, “bureaucracy lit” is a hot genre, far outselling spy stories and whodunits as the airport novel of choice. In these tales of overweening ambition, the plot devices that set readers’ pulses racing are underhanded power plays, hidden alliances and devious sexual favors. The current craze began in 1999 with “Ink Painting,” by Wang Yuewen, and has become so intense that last year a deputy bureau chief who writes a series under the pseudonym Xiaoqiao Laoshu was named China’s 17th-richest author. “Officialdom lit” is hugely popular, not just as a peek behind the curtains, but also as a go-to guide for aspiring cadres in search of their own sycophancy strategies.

[… But t]he trifling plots of bureaucracy lit look positively petty compared with the grand crimes surrounding the downfall of one of China’s highest-flying politicians, Bo Xilai, formerly the Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, whose wife was found guilty of murdering a former British business partner. Bo’s wife — or a woman rumored to be her plumper stand-in — was given a suspended death sentence, while Bo’s former police chief got 15 years for abuse of power, corruption and defection. Bo himself is facing a criminal investigation into charges including abuse of power, corruption, improper sexual relationships and possible involvement in covering up a murder. It’s hard for any novelist to compete.

Lim goes on to describe the “gargantuan irony” of official celebrations of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Also at The New York Times is a spoiler-laden review of Mo’s Sandalwood Death and Pow! by Ian Buruma, who concludes with a sympathetic assessment of the author’s widely criticized politics:

Perhaps Mo Yan really is in tune with the current Communist regime. Perhaps he simply wants to play it safe. But the political perspective of his fiction is also a reflection of his peasant spirit. To a villager, all politics are strictly local, especially in China, with its vast distances. The capital is far away. National politics aren’t the peasant’s concern. What counts is food on the table, fertility, sex and staying out of trouble, if necessary by appeasing the powerful, be they local or foreign.

[…] To demand that Mo Yan also be a political dissident is not only what the Dutch describe as “trying to pluck feathers from a frog.” It’s also unfair. A novelist should be judged on literary merit, not on his or her politics, a principle the Nobel committee hasn’t always lived up to. This time, I think it has. It would be nice if Mo Yan were more courageous, but he has given us some great stories. And that should be enough.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, books, bureaucracy, civil servants, corrupt officials, corruption, literature, mo yan, Nobel Prize, officials, Wang Xiaofang, yu hua
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OK, I’ve cheated a bit – three of the publications below are poetry, and two others come out in January 2013. Still, it’s a good haul and many times better than the annual total, say, ten years ago. (Please post a comment if I’ve missed anyone out.) I couldn’t begin to add up just how many hours of translation the whole list represents, and that’s without the extra work translators have put in, on some of these books, to get them off the ground. So, lets raise a glass to translation and all pat ourselves on the back!

[…] PS On Twitter, @cfbcuk (that’s the China Fiction Book Club) has posted each one with review links, tagged #abook4xmas.

Among the twenty is Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, translated by Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt has been variously credited with accurately rendering the Nobel-winner’s prose by Mo’s admirers, and with flattering it by his critics. Two titles were translated by Allan Barr, professor of Chinese at Pomona College. The school’s website features an interview on his translations of Han Han’s This Generation and Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words:

“Han Han’s style is sarcastic and playful, full of mischievous puns, and channeling his distinctive voice and conveying his wicked sense of humor were the biggest challenges I faced,” says Barr, who has been at Pomona since 1981.

[…] The concept of one book, China in Ten Words, was developed after Yu [Hua] spoke at Pomona in 2009. Barr had invited the writer to speak during his U.S. tour for his novel Brothers. When discussing the topic of Yu’s speech, Barr suggested Yu speak about China from a writer’s point of view, and Yu built his presentation around two common words in the contemporary Chinese language: 人民 (“people”) and 领袖 (“leader”). He realized he had other words he wanted to write about and developed the idea into a book.

“When I drove him to LAX at the end of his visit here, we agreed that I would translate the book into English,” recalls Barr. “Yu Hua wrote China in Ten Words over the months that followed, sending me each chapter as he completed it. The book’s 10 chapters all take a different word as their theme, in a wide-ranging discussion that involves memoir, anecdote, and analysis.” The book’s Taiwan edition mentions Pomona in the preface, says Barr, but that reference didn’t make it into the English edition. The book was not published in mainland China due to its critiques of the country.

See Yu Hua’s own words on the book, translated by CDT’s Don Weinland, and Perry Link’s review, via CDT. On Han Han, see recent profiles and reviews by Jeffrey Wasserstrom at Words without Borders, Rebecca Liao at The New Inquiry, Katrina Hamlin at Reuters’ Breakingviews, Duncan Hewitt at The Daily Beast and Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books, as well as an excerpt from This Generation at The Daily Beast.

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Yu Hua: A French magazine published a special issue on China. The editor-in-chief told me that they came to China and interviewed not a few people. Scholars and officials with decent living conditions were burdened by concern for China’s future, while the poor masses were full of faith in China’s future. He asked me why this is. I said that during the Beijing Olympics, when everyone stood to sing the national anthem, I sensed the people in the seats of honor were just going through the motions, while the people in the regular seats sang with blood-boiling righteous indignation.

余 华: 有家法国杂志做了一期中国专辑，杂志主编告诉我，他们来中国采访了不少人，生活条件很不错的学者和官员对中国的未来忧心忡忡，而生活条件不太好的民众对中 国的未来充满信心。他问为什么？我说北京奥运会期间全场起立唱国歌时，我感到贵宾座位上的人只是做做样子，而普通座位上的人唱得热血沸腾。

Known for sharp criticism of Chinese society, Yu is the author of To Live, adapted for film by Zhang Yimou, about one man’s struggle through the upheavals of Republican and Communist China. He wrote about the online struggle to speak freely in “The Spirit of May 35th,” published last year in the New York Times. His latest book is China in Ten Words.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Wu Qiang, a political scientist at Tsinghua University, said: “This is the most intense moment in the past 15 years and could have a big impact on society. The upcoming political competition is healthy and worth anticipating, but could potentially result in instability.”

This is the first transition that has not been shaped by the founders of the People’s Republic; President Hu Jintao was picked out by Deng Xiaoping. His ascension was the first relatively straightforward succession in its history.

Xi Jinping will almost certainly become general secretary, then president of China, with Li Keqiang as premier. The rest of the incumbents are expected to make way for newer faces – and perhaps the first woman ever to reach the body.

They will face a far more difficult time than their predecessors, said Cheng Li, a specialist on China’s elite politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In the next part of the series, The Guardian takes the temperature of four leading commentators – Tsinghua University’s Dr. Liu Yu (politics), the Global Environmental Institute’s Jin Jiaman (environment), novelist Yu Hua (society), and Tsinghua’s Wang Hui (economy) –  as they outline the potential roadblocks and opportunities the next generation will encounter. Reflecting on a year of social upheaval in China, Yu Hua looks ahead at what lies in store for the government:

As social conflict becomes sharper, maintaining stability becomes more important. The official figures say the cost of public security is more than 600bn yuan – even more than what is spent on the military, according to western media.

At least right now on the mainland, there hasn’t been any political power strong enough to challenge the party. We can see small-scale protests all over China, but all of them have one thing in common: they only fight local officials, not the central level.

As these small protests become more and more numerous, there will be more problems. The only solution is democracy, to make officials careful about what they say and what they do. If there is not a revolution, the party has to make itself democratic to ensure its own survival.

See also previous CDT coverage of China’s 5th generation of leaders as their time approaches.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, CCP 5th generation, leadership transition, Xi Jinping, yu hua
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To my eye, the most poignant of Yu’s observations on the Mao legacy are those that describe the death of empathy. He writes that “two scenes [from the Cultural Revolution] linger before my eyes, one that sums up for me the beauty of human character and another that epitomizes its ugliness.” The beautiful scene is of a father, under horrendous political pressure, who is saying good-bye to his young son without revealing to the son that he is about to commit suicide. I then brace myself for Yu’s “most ugly” scene. What will it be? Gouged eyes? Fried human livers? Cultural Revolution history, as well as Yu’s own writings, leave much to choose from.

But Yu surprises me with this story: when he was in second grade, he and his friends would show up early for school and play on a playground until school began. A cluster of teachers watched over them. The teachers always chatted jovially, occasionally cackling over some amusing story, and obviously had good rapport. One day, when Yu was the first child to arrive at school, one of the teachers beckoned to him “conspiratorially” and told him, “with obvious relish,” that another of the teachers had been found to be the daughter of a landlord. Fresh news! Delicious! Time to pile on! Now the camaraderie meant nothing. Young Yu was shocked to see “how this teacher was savoring the other’s downfall.” Yu recalls that later, as teenagers, he and his friends themselves adopted Mao’s spirit and “got a kick out of bullying those weaker than ourselves.” In a chapter on the growing gap between rich and poor in China today, Yu writes that “poverty and hunger are not as shocking as willful indifference to them.”

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Post tags: Cultural Revolution, history, literature, Mao Zedong, perry link, yu hua
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The book’s 10 chapters present images of ordinary life in China over the past four decades—from the violent, repressive years of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when the author grew up, to the upheavals and dislocations of the current economic miracle. Along the way, Mr. Yu ranges widely into politics, economics, history, culture and society. His aim, he writes, is to “clear a path through the social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China.”

And he succeeds marvelously. “China in Ten Words” captures the heart of the Chinese people in an intimate, profound and often disturbing way. If you think you know China, you will be challenged to think again. If you don’t know China, you will be introduced to a country that is unlike anything you have heard from travelers or read about in the news.

The book’s narrative structure is unusual. Each chapter is an essay organized around a single word. It’s not spoiling any surprises to list the 10 words that the author has chosen in order to describe his homeland: people, leader, reading, writing, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer). None is likely to appear on the list of banned words and phrases that China’s censors enforce when they monitor Internet use. But in Mr. Yu’s treatment, each word can be subversive, serving as a springboard for devastating critiques of Chinese society and, especially, China’s government.

Read more by and about Yu Hua via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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I once tried to post online a literary essay of mine. Though it made no reference whatsoever to politics, an error message kept popping up. Innocently, I assumed I must have miswritten a character or two, and marveled that technology could detect typos so easily. But after careful proofreading and revision of the odd phrase here and there, that frosty error message continued to appear. Finally I realized that the text had violated several taboos. Though widely scattered in different paragraphs, the offending words left the automated censors with little doubt that I was indulging in political dissent.

We have no way of knowing how many words have been blacklisted, or which once-banned words can now be used. Sometimes you can manage to avoid all the taboos and post your opinion, but if it is couched in too explicit an idiom, it will get deleted almost right away.

So we adapt. With the Chinese government so bent on promoting a “harmonious society,” Internet users slyly tailor the phrase for their own purposes. If someone writes, “Be careful you don’t get harmonized,” what they mean is “Be careful you don’t get shut down” or “Be careful you don’t get arrested.” Harmonize has to be the word most thoroughly imbued with the May 35th spirit. Officials are aware, of course, of its barbed meaning on the Internet, but they can hardly ban it, because to do so would be to outlaw the “harmonious society” they are plugging. Harmony has been hijacked by the public.

Such is China’s Internet politics. Practically everyone has mastered the art of May 35th expression, and I myself am no slouch.

About 200 examples of such terminology are compiled and explained in CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon.

Read more by and about Yu Hua via CDT.

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Like thick weeds, thirty years of societal quandary and dilemma have been concealed by the optimism of high-speed economic development. My work at this time is going in exactly the opposite direction. Starting with today’s apparently glorious results, I will go in search of that which might make some feel uneasy.

This time I hope I’m able to abbreviate contemporary China’s endless chatter into 10 simple words. I hope this narration, which will surpass time and space, can blend rational analysis, emotional experience and intimate stories into one. I hope my diligent work can, from within contemporary China’s earthshaking changes and tumultuous and complex society, open a clear and genuine road of narration.

The people
Each and every one encounters many words in their lives. There are some words that are understood the first time we set eyes on them. And there are some words we interact with our whole lives but still never understand. The word “the people” is this kind of problem.

Leaders
Leaders consider the future in the light of the past. I feel today’s China is already void of national leaders, and only has heads of state.
Reading
With every reading of one of those great works, I am carried away by them … Only after returning do I know that they are already a part of me.

Writing
Writing is like an experience. If one experiences nothing, they cannot understand their own life. By the same token, if one doesn’t write, they cannot know what they are capable of writing.

Lu Xun
Lu Xun’s fate in China went from the fate of an author to the fate of a word. And again, from the fate of a word, back to the fate of an author. From him radiated the fate of China as well. The changes in Chinese history, the turmoil of society, can be seen within the name “Lu Xun,” like finding the coming autumn in the colors of a single leaf.

Disparity
The disparity of today’s China, one could say, is a great disparity. It seems we exist within such a reality where the great pleasures of life flow at once like wine, while the walls of society crumble in ruin. Or it could be said that we exist in a bizarre theater in which a comedy plays on one half of the stage, a tragedy on the other … This is today’s China. Not only do we exist between the great disparity of reality and history, but between that of reality and dream.

Revolution
What is revolution? In my memories of days past, there is varying opinion on the answer. Revolution pervades lives with the unknown. Between dawn and dusk, a destiny can be split in two. In an instant, one is launched into their prime, while another falls into oblivion. Personal relationships – the buttoning of society – are also in a revolution of fasten and release. Today’s brothers in revolution are distant; tomorrow they may be class enemies.

Grassroots
Since the grassroots Opening and Reform, the Chinese legal system has gradually grown sound. Yet many loopholes exist within law and regulation, granting the grassroots players large quantities of backdoor opportunism. So any humanly possible miracle can be pulled from the sleeves of the grassroots reformers.

Mountain Stronghold
One could say the Chinese societal climate is grotesquely fantastic. Magnificence and unsightliness, advancement and backwardness, austerity and dissipation often exist within a single entity. The mountain fortress phenomenon is precisely like this, demonstrating society’s progress, and its retreat.

Hoodwink
The rapid popularization of the word hoodwink is similar to mountain fortress. In the same respect, it illustrates the ethical insufficiencies and chaotic values of contemporary Chinese society. It is the aftermath of 30 years of lopsided development. What’s more, the prevalence of the hoodwinking phenomena in regards to our society is greater than that of the mountain fortress phenomena. When hoodwinking dominates the playing field, we are living in a society which takes nothing to heart or, in other words, a society unyielding to principle.

Vagueness and distance has always existed in the foreigner’s written criticism of China. But only those who have really lived on Chinese soil can produce an earnest description of the Chinese people’s thoughts and feelings. Just as Yu Hua said: “As I recorded China’s pain in this book, so did I record my own pain. Because it is China’s pain, so it is also my personal pain.”

© Don Weinland for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: literature, views of China, writers, yu hua
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I realize now that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words “the people.” Those words have little meaning in China today.

“The people,” or renmin, is one of the first phrases I learned to read and write. I knew our country was called “the People’s Republic of China.” Chairman Mao told us to “serve the people.” The most important paper was People’s Daily. “Since 1949, the people are the masters,” we learned to say.

[...] Today, few young Chinese know anything about what happened at Tiananmen Square, and those who do only say vaguely, “A lot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.”

The people. Still, it was not the rallies in Tiananmen Square that made me truly understand these words, but an episode one night in late May.

See also:

- Dance With Democracy by Li Yiyun
- ‘Here Come the Workers!’ by Lijia Zhang
- Exiled to English by Ha Jin

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Post tags: 1989 20 years, 1989 protests, ha jin, Li Yiyun, yu hua
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As the country approaches its anniversary, NPR asks three of China’s most astute observers for their perspectives. They are best-selling novelists with sales in the millions. Each author is a product of his era, shaped by the prevailing political forces of his generation.

In a three-part series, each author offers his distinct views — of the country and the changing social order. Collectively, they expose a wide generation gap between young Chinese and their forbearers.

The first installment profiles writer Jiang Rong:

Wearing his thick horn-rimmed spectacles and a V-neck beige sweater, Jiang doesn’t look like a freedom fighter as he sips coffee in the lobby of a five-star hotel. But looks can be deceiving. In Wolf Totem, the author attacks the weakness of the Chinese national character by criticizing the ethos that underlies it, Confucianism.

“Confucianism wants people to become sheep. Its central tenet is obedience, following the emperor,” Jiang explains. “In essence, the political system during the Cultural Revolution was the same as that of the last several thousand years: Both were autocratic, totalitarian and dictatorial.”

“I’m criticizing China’s cultural roots. It’s not a surface problem. It’s like grass: If you cut it out, the roots are still there,” he says.

The second installment profiles Yu Hua, author of Brothers:

“The Cultural Revolution was a craziness for revolution, then we had a craziness to earn money,” Yu says. “It’s like a pendulum that’s swung from one extreme to another. It’s gone from being an extremely oppressive society to being an extremely free one with no moderation.”

Brothers, a lewd, rambunctious, heartbreaking epic of modern China, has sold 1.3 million copies. It is wildly popular — and widely criticized — at home.

The next installment will focus on writer Guo Jingming.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1949 60 years, anniversaries, jiang rong, PRC history, writers, yu hua
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Yu Hua’s ambition here is to create an epic of China’s last four decades: a portrait of the country’s transformation from political thuggery to money worship. In the interests of achieving a faithful likeness, he has discarded the cool, sparing voice that made his name as a serious novelist between the 1980s and 1990s, and opted for crudeness in almost every respect: in the freakish protagonists and plot twists; in the repetitions and expletives; in the fountains of body fluids.

Contemporary China, Yu Hua has reasoned, “is so sick that a writer can’t pretend to be a doctor. Instead, the best one can do is admit that one is ill and try to describe the symptoms.” His decision to make his art imitate life works best in the first third of the book, set in the cultural revolution. Here, the coarseness of the language is well-matched to the horror of the violence, while the novel’s two most sympathetic characters – the brothers’ parents – are drawn skilfully enough for the reader to flinch at the tragedy of their lives.

As you trudge through the long post-Mao sections, though, the author’s refusal to process the raw material of the contemporary People’s Republic grows tiring. Yu Hua owes his immense literary fame in mainland China to a series of dark, highly controlled narratives about the moral disintegration of post-1949 society. In Brothers, he has taken the crafted restraint out of his nastiness, leaving plain nastiness. A few images are arresting enough to give you pause; the rest of the text bludgeons with exaggeration or facetious use of cliché. The novel is supposed to be funny, but mostly fails to be, because its tone and plot are so relentlessly hyperbolic that no punchline can properly stand out. Yu Hua is too busy jumping from one grotesquerie to another to give us a moment to contemplate their absurdity.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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