Ma Jian:The Dark Road from China
Amy Hawkins talks to the Chinese writer and exiled dissident about China’s one child policy, and how he still hopes to go home
by Amy Hawkins
Thursday 30th January 2014, 18:05 GMT
MA JIAN
Ma Jian has not been allowed to return to China since 2011
“I write for the weak and vulnerable, those who have no voice in China,” says Ma Jian, speaking through an interpreter. This is what drives him to write. Considering that his work has been banned in China for the last 25 years, and he
himself has been banned for nearly three, it would seem safe to say that he is the one who has been silenced. However, he does not see it this way. Although an unpopular figure with the Chinese Communist Party, he continues to write prolifically, having recently published his sixth novel, The Dark Road.
“Government is temporary, literature is forever,” he tells me, drawing an analogy between his works and the historically banned Soviet literature that is now freely available to Russian citizens. One day, he hopes, his words will reach those who inspired them.