In the style of parents with teenagers, they complained his hair was
too long, he’d an overactive interest in girls and his disreputable
friends came around late at night to drink beer. In this case
though, the teenager was Ma Jian – a thirty year old photographer
and artist – the parent was the Chinese Communist Party, and the
penalties were a lot more drastic than cutting off of pocket money.
Most books on China treat the early 1980s are a convenient stage for
a happy ending: the end of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao
and the first tentative steps towards economic and social
liberalisation. Ma Jian’s new book, Red Dust, picks up the baton at
this point – as he sets out on a Chatwinesque journey of
self-discovery – intending what it meant to be Chinese, and what it
meant to be Ma Jian.
The political, social and economic liberalisations of the Open Door
Policy tried to both unlock and harness powerful forces within China
that had been suppressed in the days of Mao. While capitalisation
was allowed, democracy was not. There was a powerful explosion of
expectation, and a demand for rapid change. The extreme social and
political state of China at the time is exemplified by a list of
condemned criminals in the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution:
‘Wang, male, 24 years. Listened to enemy radio stations and
corrupted his friends with counter-revolutionary discourse.
Chen, male, 27 years. Since June 1979 made frequent plots to leave
the country.
Lu, male, 25 years. Held private parties and danced cheek to cheek
in the dark, forcefully hugging his female dancers and touching
their breasts.
Yang, male 31 years. Duping 25 women into marrying farmers in Anhui
and Qinghai with empty promises of a better life.’
On
the twelfth anniversary of Tiananmen Square I met Ma Jian in a cafe
in Soho. He still had his long hair and beard, and he told me that
when he was young his teacher advised him not to paint people, but
to stick to landscapes. Landscapes were less likely to be
criticised as bourgeois. Partly because of this, Ma Jian turned to
writing. Writing gave him the freedom to paint people with words;
to document in fiction the challenges facing the people around him.
‘In my book I wanted to go back to the beginning of the opening up
and reform period to try and understand what China is today. I want
to work out why Chinese society is so cruel – how in the pursuit of
profit they can forget everything else.’
In
this journey Ma Jian walks over 3,000 miles in a period of three
years: crossing the Gobi Desert, the mountains of Tibet, the lush
rainforests of Yunnan – and in Qinghai he clubs a pair of gangsters
unconscious with a stool. But much more than just a travel book,
Red Dust is a spiritual journey of one man trying to work out the
world he lives in. It is told with uncompromising honesty and
humanity: both the good and the bad.
‘If you’ve grown up in a brutal totalitarian regime the balance
inside you between good and bad is squewed. Totalitarian regimes do
not need pity or concern for others, they’re like machines.’
Although Ma Jian took Buddhist vows before leaving, the start
economics of post-Communist China meant he struggled to survive –
turning from artist and writer to sock salesman and even
fraudulently flogging washing powder as teeth whitener in an effort
to stay solvent.
‘While I was travelling I very rarely had the time to collect my
thoughts and rationalise what I was doing and come up with ideas. I
was just too busy trying to make money. I learnt that physical
wandering – using your feet to find your path has no meaning. The
most important journey is the inner journey to find yourself.’
The end of the book arrives in Tibet: the natural end for a Buddhist
looking for enlightenment. But the realities there – political
suppression of Tibetan monasteries and the influx of Han Chinese
immigrants – lead to disappointment and a few dangerous moments as
Ma Jian experiences the Tibetan backlash against this colonisation.
‘It’s inevitable that areas like Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang
will one-day break away from Han Chinese control. The people of
these areas are not at ease with the Han people and Han culture.
Although immigrants outnumber Tibetans in Tibet, they will not stop
the break away. Look at how the Anglo-Irish sided with the Irish in
their quest for independence. The same will happen in China.’
Of
course the end of the book is not the end of Ma Jian’s journey. At
the end of the book he declares his intention to return to his
house, no. 53 Nanxiao Lane. ‘When I got back to Beijing, I took
some policemen friends out for some beers to find out what my
political situation was. They told me that I was in a difficult and
precarious position. I decided I had to leave for Hong Kong.’ And
there he lived until meeting his now partner and translator, Flora
Drew, in 1997 at the time of the Hong Kong hand-over – and has lived
in London since then.
Many people wonder at Hong Kong, the flagship of a capitalist
economy being dropped into the lap of a Communist government: but
it’s a masquerade to call China a communist country. This name
suits countries like America who need an emotive label, and it suits
the Chinese Communist Party who’ve founded their credibility on
Marxism-Leninism. In reality the Communist Party is China’s new
dynasty, and behind the illusion you find a blunt capitalist
dictatorship.
‘At the moment the power rests in the hands of the political
children, but like Hong Kong and Singapore the power will move to
rest in the hands of the businessmen. Unfortunately China has none
of the tenets of democracy central to Western civilisation. But the
internet economy will chip away at their tyranny.’
Ma
Jian’s Red Dust is an excellent insight into a dramatic stage of
Chinese history - as the Communists began their pirouette into
capitalism, leaving modern China a dizzy and confused place. The
certainties of the past have been replaced with opportunities that
most people are unable to take advantage of. It is a country where
the power of the state has been used to make friends and family
fabulously rich. A state where the countryside is wracked by
sporadic peasant uprisings, and the big cities are modern dynamic
metropolises – making the future of China look both more secure and
less stable at the same time.
It
was in attempting to capture these extremes that I wrote my novel –
The Drink and Dream Teahouse – soon to be translated and published
in China. Ma Jian was curious about a Westerner writing a novel set
in China, and the mirrored journeys that had led us from very
different beginnings, to write such similar books about contemporary
China.
‘Westerners go to China to find themselves,’ he said, ‘but the
Chinese who come to the West lose themselves. When you leave you
have a secure home to go back to. When the Chinese flee they have a
black hole of insecurity. These people are exiles. They can’t go
home again.’
‘There are two different types of Chinese in Britain,’ Ma Jian
said. ‘The economic refugees, who work in Cantonese restaurants,
are more happy than the political refugees. The political refugees
often have mental problems or breakdowns. Here they have no
identity. They try to define themselves through their cultural
background: turn to spiritual breathing exercises like Qigong or
nationalism. All of them love China more when they leave. They do
not live in the West, they live on the West.’
In
today’s world, travel is an almost mandatory experience – but there
are two ways of travelling. Physical travel is going somewhere,
getting a tan, eating the food and going out at night to pick up
some of the local bacteria. Travel that involves a mental journey
is the rarer and more meaningful form of movement. Learning the
language, understanding and integrating with an alien culture means
a partial rewriting of yourself. But this form of travel also has a
downside. The hardest journey of all is in going home.
‘After I left Tibet the Campaign for Spiritual Pollution had ended
and I through it was safe for me to return to Beijing. But when I
got back I lost all my nostalgia for the place,’ Ma Jian said. ‘My
memories and the reality were too far apart. I didn’t feel for the
city anymore.’ It was the same for me in coming home: being at home
in China means I can never be truly at home in Britain again,
without losing something – or flitting between the two countries.
‘Everyone’s life is a journey from a starting point to an ending
point,’ Ma Jian told me, ‘and even if you come back to the place
where you started out from, you still have to go on the journey.
The place might not change – but you have.’
