"‘One of China’s greatest living novelists’ GUARDIAN
Blending fact with fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, his nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.
This darkly comic fable is a dystopian vision of repression and state-enforced amnesia set not in the future, but in China today.
‘Excoriating…Not for nothing has Ma been called both the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature’ A Financial Times Book of the Year
‘Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegot, sort of: powerful!’
MARGARET ATWOOD
English translation copyright 2018 by Flora Drew"
"In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping was clamping down on 'Spiritual Pollution'; young people were rebelling. With his long hair, jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China and set off in search of himself.
The result is a compelling and utterly unique insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider and an outsider in his own country could have written.
‘Honest, raw, insightful... The Chinese equivalent of On the Road’ TIME"
"Meili, a young peasant woman living in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a distant descendant of Confucius. Desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, the family escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life."
