Posted on 1 February 2015 by Nicholas Jose
Creative fiction has a venerable history in the People’s Republic of China. Many would argue that the nation’s very foundations lie in its creative fictions. Nonetheless, one of the achievements of the post-Mao era is that the voices and stories of the many have challenged the previous monologue of the party-state, enriching or at least complicating it in the process.
There’s the saying that everyone has a book in them, but in Big Daddy Xi Jinping’s increasingly ideologically policed China, there is an unsettling possibility that everyone may end up writing the same tome. As the following essay by the noted Australian writer Nicholas Jose points out, independent creative writing has flourished in mainland China in recent years. It is hardly a surprise then that the pumped up decibels of the official China Dream as well as the crafted China Story of the party-state are being used to drown out the beautiful polyphony of the country’s graphomaniacs.
Will such renewed attempts to replace the many with the one enjoy success? It is worth noting that Chairman of Everything Xi recently led the Communist Party’s powerful Politburo in yet another study session devoted to Dialectical Materialism, and it is sobering to recall what Simon Leys said about this underpinning theory of the Marxist-Leninist state a quarter of a century ago (notwithstanding Slavoj Žižek’s witty defence of an ideal Marxism-Leninism):
Dialectics is the jolly art that enables the Supreme Leader never to make mistakes—for even if he did the wrong thing, he did it at the right time, which makes it right for him to have been wrong, whereas the Enemy, even if he did the right thing, did it at the wrong time, which makes it wrong for him to have been right.
When the leader is infallible, creative fiction flourishes.
Nicholas Jose is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and a celebrated author, playwright and essayist. He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing in the heady years from 1987 to 1990. His most recent book is a collection of stories titled Bapo (Giramondo Publishing, 2014).—The Editors