Ma Jian: I need to witness

Guillaume Basset: You have been living in exile for 22 years (if we include your stay in Hong Kong before it was returned to China in 1997), but you are still writing about your native country… How do you maintain your connection to it?

Ma Jian: I am not an exile in the conventional sense. Although my books have been banned in China since 1987, and the media is forbidden from even mentioning my name, I am free to return to China, so long as I keep a low profile and stay away from other ‘politically sensitive’ people.  In the last twenty years, I have returned to China continually, sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for up to a year. My mother, siblings and eldest daughter live there. Maintaining my connection with China is crucial for my writing and psychological well-being. I need to witness the huge changes taking place in my homeland. But I find it very hard to write there. When I sit at my desk there, I’m always glancing over my shoulder, waiting for the police to come knocking on my door. As soon as I put pen to paper, I feel as though I’m committing a crime.

GB: You were a member of the Communist Party but in the beginning of the 1980’s you  resigned of your job for a propaganda magazine and left Beijing.  Have you ever believed in a kind of “Socialism with a human face,” as some in the Czech Republic have?

MJ: Actually, I have never been a member of the Communist Party. As an adolescent, during the Cultural Revolution, I belonged to an arts troupe that performed propaganda shows, and later I worked as a photo-journalist for a state-owned magazine, but I was never a Party member.  In my late-twenties, I moved to Beijing and joined the underground art scene, and it was then that I began to see Chinese Socialism for what it was. I realized that its aim was to eliminate independent thought and reduce human beings to tools of the state.

GB: In “Red Dust,” you were told the story of your journey throughout China. In retrospect, so you think the purpose of the journey was to discover your own country or to discover yourself?

MJ: At the time, it was illegal to travel in China without official approval. As a photo-journalist, I had to warp reality to fit the desires of the state. I longed to explore China independently, and see it with my own eyes. So I resigned from my job and hit the road. After a few months, I began to sense that more than my country, it was myself I was searching for. I felt that the further I travelled, the closer I got to the essence of who I was.

GB: I have been to China twice and, travelling through the country, I didn’t have the feeling that the population really has democratic demands, I sensed more of a mix of pride and servility in regard to the regime. Am I wrong? If not, is it the result of a long history of oppression or is it a simply part of the Chinese mentality, as has been frequently suggested?

MJ: The only democracy that China has ever experienced is the 30 or so days in 1989 when university students occupied Tiananmen Square. And ever since the government cracked down on the students on 4 June, it has done its best to erase all memory of those days from the minds of the Chinese people.  Today, most of the Chinese people who do remember that episode thinks of it as a momentary aberration in the country’s authoritarian tradition, a moment of mass insanity. They have accepted the government propaganda that without one-Party rule, China would implode. Huge numbers of Chinese people are materially better off today, and think that democracy is superfluous. But, along with others in the small and dwindling group of critics of the system, I believe that freedom, democracy and human rights are essential to a meaningful life.

GB: Your last novel is mainly about the crackdown, do you think that this kind of event is still possible today?

MJ: As long as the Communist Party exists, massacres will continue to take place. These days, the authorities take more care to hide the violence from the eyes of the Western media. But far away from Beijing, in Tibet, Xinjiang and remote labour camps and psychiatric prisons, the torture, oppression and killings continue.

GB: It was Deng Xiaoping who gave the order to shoot at the Tiananmen square demonstrators, the same Deng Xiaoping who reintroduced in China a capitalist economic system. Is this proof of the error in thinking that because China’s economy is becoming liberal, its political system will as well?

MJ: Yes. In fact, China’s economy owes much of its success to the totalitarian system. No Western democracy would have allowed its workers to endure the low wages and sweat-shop conditions that the Chinese have had to put up with.

GB: You returned to China for the Olympics, how did you feel during your stay?

MJ: During the Olympics, Beijing felt like a city under siege. The games were turned into a huge mass movement. The 1.3 billion people inside and outside the stadiums were all participants in the propaganda show. Not one note of criticism, or even light sarcasm, was tolerated. Dissidents, vagrants, migrant workers and even mentally unstable citizens were imprisoned or expelled from the city. And the West joined in with the jubilant applause. It was disgraceful and sickening.

GB: What is the biggest change in today’s China from the country you left?

MJ: While there is still much poverty in the countryside, huge numbers of people in the cities are living comfortable, middle-class lives, but they have been forced to forget about the pain of the past or the hidden, ugly realities of the present. It is as though an extravagant, opulent wedding were being held in a graveyard.

GB: You have been described by a very famous writer as “one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature,” who would you consider to be the others and why?

MJ: Gao Xingjian, Zheng Yi, Yan Lianke. Outside literature, the essayist Liu Xiaobo, who is now in detention for writing the 08 Charter.

24 Janurary 2009