{"id":7750,"date":"2016-11-12T18:24:37","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T23:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=7750"},"modified":"2016-11-15T05:34:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T10:34:16","slug":"jiayang-fan-yan-liankes-novel-assesses-the-moral-cost-of-chinas-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/jiayang-fan-yan-liankes-novel-assesses-the-moral-cost-of-chinas-growth","title":{"rendered":"JIAYANG FAN: Yan Lianke\u2019s Novel Assesses the Moral Cost of China\u2019s Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yan Lianke. Credit Philippe Picquier<\/p><\/div>\n

THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES<\/strong>
\nBy Yan Lianke
\nTranslated by Carlos Rojas
\n457 pp. Grove Press. $26.<\/p>\n

Here are four scenarios to test one\u2019s ability to differentiate between fact and fiction in modern China: (1) Elderly people hastily kill themselves so that they will be buried traditionally, in tombs, before a cremation law takes effect. (2) Thousands of dead pigs float down the river of a major metropolis that supplies drinking water to 26 million residents. (3) A village of several hundred inhabitants swells into a city of 20 million, its growth fueled by prostitution and corruption. (4) All three story lines are used as inspiration by a Communist Party propagandist-turned-novelist who is both celebrated and censored by a country that can\u2019t make up its mind on whether he should be exalted or exiled.<\/p>\n

If all four scenarios seem fantastical, Yan Lianke, the propagandist-turned-writer, will have succeeded in realizing a central theme of \u201cThe Explosion Chronicles,\u201d a novel premised on No.\u202f3: that what Yan calls the \u201cincomprehensible absurdity\u201d of contemporary China \u2014 elderly people in the city of Anxing reportedly did kill themselves to avoid cremation; thousands of dead pigs did float down the Huangpu River \u2014 renders the boundary between reality and fantasy virtually indistinguishable. Stylistically, this is not new terrain for Yan, whose fiction has lampooned some of the darkest moments in Chinese history, including the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the 1990s AIDS scandal in his home province of Henan. In this latest work, however, Yan shifts his irreverent gaze from the past to the present and toward projections of the future, taking stock of China\u2019s vertiginous economic rise and the astonishing dissolution of its collective social conscience.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Explosion Chronicles\u201d traces the ascent of a \u201cfallen fruit\u201d village named Explosion to a city on par with Shanghai and Beijing. The levers of power rest within the Kong family (incidentally, also the surname of Confucius), which divvies up political, economic and military might among four brothers. Prosperity is the official religion, while prostitution and larceny are among the founding industries. Bribery, fraud and vote-rigging are so common and lucrative that their impropriety is efficiently buried under heaps of money; appropriately, Explosion is soon celebrated for holding the first democratic elections since the founding of the People\u2019s Republic.<\/p>\n

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The Kongs, who treat Explosion like a familial plot of land to be irrigated with Deng-era watchwords \u2014 economic \u201cdevelopment zone\u201d; \u201ccentral policy directives\u201d; Reform and Opening Up campaign \u2014 do not only want to install a new dynasty. By the time Explosion has been promoted from town to county, the rulers view themselves as gods, and in magic-realist fashion, the moral chaos is horrifyingly reflected in the dysfunction of nature. A member of the Kong clan can literally make snow fall from the sky with one document and get flowers to bloom from his pen tip. The climate acquiesces to the demands of urban expectation, and everything from squirrels to crickets to shrubbery is reduced to a subject of the Kong empire.<\/p>\n

As with Yan\u2019s previous novels, the formal inventiveness of \u201cThe Explosion Chronicles\u201d is impressive and its fictional universe vividly drawn. But one cannot help wishing it were less an operatic allegory of political principles and more a story, animated by fallible protagonists who are not entirely devoid of moral ambivalence. In an Op-Ed<\/span><\/a> for The New York Times in 2014, Yan lamented the costs of China\u2019s economic development. \u201cNo one can tell us what price should be paid for human feelings, human nature and human dignity,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhat is the price for abandoning the ideals of democracy, freedom, law and morality?\u201d These are grim but urgent questions that affect the varied lives of 1.4 billion. I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth, to imagine the answers.<\/p>\n