Howard French of Wall Street Journal reviews The Fat Years
2012-02-05 20:46阅读：
Fragile China
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Wall Street Journal 2012-2-4
What becomes of a nation when
it attains its long-harbored goal of surpassing the world's
longtime economic leader?
Recent history offers two
imperfect but instructive examples. In the early 20th century,
Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany interpreted its sprint past Britain as
license to reshape the world in its image—by force.
Several decades later Japan
began conquering the world with its goods, briefly surpassing the
U.S., at least in per capita nominal GD
P. This prompted much hand-wringing in the West about how to keep
up with this new economic juggernaut and its rapidly acquired
wealth. Almost as quickly as it had risen, though, in the 1990s
Japan embarked on an extended navel-gazing walkabout from which it
has never really returned.
Both of these episodes have
been explored thoroughly in literature. But 'The Fat Years,' an
inventive and highly topical novel by Chan Koonchung, is among the
first to explore a scenario that much of the world is speculating
about today: What happens once China can boast having the world's
top economy? His descriptions of the excesses of contemporary
China—the book is set in the very near future of 2013—are so vivid
that the book was banned in China when it was first published in
2009, and the background of world economic crisis has the immediacy
of journalism, a setup to which Mr. Chan adds a speculative
dystopian twist.
Mr. Chan, who was born in
Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, mentions no historical
precedents, but anyone familiar with the Japanese experience will
notice similarities to the brief years of Japan's flirtation with
being the world's most successful, if not largest,
economy.
Beginning in the 1960s,
Japanese leaders rang in each new year with celebrations of the
country's fast-rising GDP. But 20 years later, with no one left to
catch up with, the country woke up deprived of motivation and
purpose. Amid this new emptiness, all that was left was the forced
celebration of self, or Japanese-ness, and the use of deep pockets
to chase conspicuous and increasingly decadent
consumption.
Mr. Chan's China shares some of
these traits. Art galleries become celebrated for their size, not
for the quality of their collections, much less what any particular
collection has to say. His characters satisfy themselves with the
rarest French vintages or drive around Beijing in Audi SUVs, which
in the era of new wealth count as relatively discreet. For one
mercenary female character, the best men of Europe are no longer
sufficient; it is now China where the best and brightest, not to
mention the richest, trophy mates are to be found.
China, in the novel, is distinctly different from Japan
in one respect. Hollow triumphalism is not enough. The country
retains big ambitions, including the aim to usher in an age of
'post-Westernism and post-universalism.' It has abruptly moved from
a place that obsesses about stability and harmony to a state where
happiness is the near-universal norm, feeding its belief that its
values trump those of the West.
Yet a few of his characters are
able to perceive that something is amiss. Most notably, the month
on the calendar when the world transitioned from the old
Western-dominated order to the officially proclaimed Chinese
'Golden Age of Prosperity' has gone missing.
A central character ponders the
proliferation of erasures when he goes to a large Beijing bookstore
and notes the absence of anything controversial, or even complex,
about the country's past.
During the long years of
radical socialism, he says, 'everyone knew that the true facts were
being suppressed.' By contrast, nowadays 'there is a profusion of
books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts
are still being suppressed. It's just that people are under the
illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and
freely choosing what they read.'
In his basic premise, which
concerns a state of mass, collective amnesia—perhaps chemically
induced—Mr. Chan draws heavily from Orwell's '1984.' The stories of
the few who have escaped this fate animate the plot, as they search
one another out amid the zombified masses.
The profound question that this
novel contemplates is just how far power can be decoupled from
ideas, starting with knowledge of oneself and one's own history. As
China continues to rise while working hard to control information
and mold its people's thought, it is a question that many will be
asking.
—Mr. French, who
teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,
is writing a book about China's relationship with
Africa.
