13 Sep 2011 | Person To Person

An interview with Chan Koonchung 

Chan Koonchung, whose books have been banned from distribution in China, discusses thrillers and freedom with Heather Farmbrough. 

The Hong-Kong born journalist and film-maker Chan Koonchung and his Chinese wife Yu Qi, and I are discussing Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy over mushroom and pea risotto and mineral water in Edinburgh. Brown’s, where we are having lunch, is a stone’s throw from Charlotte Square where Chung is making his first appearance at an international book festival to talk about his first novel, The Fat Years.

Like Larsson, Chung’s first novel is a thriller. It has a strongly political overtone, whereas Larsson’s depiction of right-wing extremists, about which he regularly wrote as a journalist, is more of an undercurrent to the narrative. Chung mentions, thoughtfully, that Larsson received death threats and I point out that he too has taken a risk in writing this book. “Yes,” he says, in his calm and measured way, “but it is worse for her (Qi). She is Chinese.”

When The Fat Years was published in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2009, carefully written reviews appeared online and in mainstream newspapers in China. For some six months, online book sellers managed to sell copies on Chinese websites, but then the virtual sellers had their accounts closed. Publishers came from the mainland to see Chung in Hong Kong and asked to publish it in China. “I asked them to read the book first, and they never returned,” he recalls. “There was no point in trying.”

I ask Chung how many books he has sold; he has no idea. He has written a book in Chinese that will never make the Chinese best seller lists: no-one will ever dare publish a book that is not officially publishable.

It is not hard to see why. The Fat Years has been described as a Chinese 1984, its sub-text that no country can afford to be without idealists, and a warning that contemporary China is fertile soil for those who wish to bury their heads in the sand.  Chung says “I just set out to make the point that it is dangerous to forget about what has happened in the past.”

Set in Beijing in 2013, The Fat Years is about a lost month, early in 2011, which comes between the end of a cataclysmic financial Western melt-down and the beginning of China’s ‘Golden Age’ of prosperity. China’s inhabitants are almost drowning in collective amnesia and hedonistic materialism. All unhappy memories of the past seem to have been erased, other than those of a small group of friends who set out to try to discover what happened. The novel is written through the eyes of Old Chen, a Taiwanese writer. Chung says he chose a Taiwanese character as his main protagonist because he too comes from outside China. When the Communists came to power in 1949, Chung’s parents fled, unable to return for thirty years until the Cultural Revolution was over.

After several false starts on a novel, the idea came to Chung in 2008. “It was a very important year as far as the Chinese mentality is concerned,” he says. “2008: that was the year of the Olympics.”

And the global financial meltdown, I say. “Yes, the Olympics and the meltdown, among other things. And the meltdown altered China’s self perception upwards. We avoided the meltdown; while the West went down, China went up.”

The most chilling character, I suggest, is the ambitious Communist party member and law student, Wei Guo, who despises his idealistic mother with whom Old Chen is in love. “Yes. He is a really negative character in the book and many mainland commentaries have focused on this too, because he is a new kind of character in Chinese literature. People in my generation in China have always put their hopes on the younger generation. But with this one, Wei Guo, the young generation are worse than the present generation.”

Chung is concerned about the lack of idealism in the young. He sees many similar figures to Wei Guo, mainly among young people in the elite universities. “The ordinary young people may not feel like that, but many of the most successful students in the system do. The system has moulded them; the system somehow encourages people to be deceitful and show disloyalty. Informing is important. If you want to be a Communist party member you have to inform on your fellow students. It is instilled on these young people that it will help their career if they join the party. The party only wants the brightest so students have to show they are the best. The party recruits heavily among the leading colleges and top private companies; many private companies have a communist cell.”

Chung has also spoken about the dangers of depopulation as the countryside is abandoned in search of jobs in towns and cities. Is there any alternative as China rushes to become the industrial superpower? As China becomes more of a capitalistic economy, its workers are now exploiting themselves. “I don’t know the answer to your question”, Chung replies, “other than China’s way is the way of East Asians: Japan and Korea and Hong Kong and Singapore. It’s always the Oriental way to build up wealth by using cheap labour. For the peasants they consider it lucky that they can make some money in the cities, leaving their families behind. It’s been like that for over 20 years, and the second generation farming communities have never spent a day on the farms. They don’t know how to cultivate crops any more. So it’s a totally changed way of life, and probably there’s no turning back.”

We discuss censorship in China, and the freedom of speech the West takes for granted. In The Fat Years, China is 90% free. I ask him how free China is now – 95%? “It could be more,” he says. “There are only certain things that people are not supposed to talk about in China. You can talk about anything other than those things.”

But the democratic West has problems too. Chung describes how people in China look to the US, and how the American arguments about democracy ring hollow in Communist countries after eight years of George W. Bush.  We talk about the damage caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and then move closer to Edinburgh, to Europe and we are back to the dangers of right-wing extremism in Europe that Larsson wrote about, a threat brought to reality by the massacre at Utøya.

“Yes” replies Chung. “What a disappointment. It is a bad example, and at a bad time with China looking abroad for a model or some kind of beacon of democracy.”

I feel bad that we have let down this courageous and gracious man. 
  
 

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Author: Heather Farmbrough
Heather worked in the city as a stockbroker and fund manager before joining the Financial Times where she was Junior Markets and Smaller Companies correspondant. She has contributed to publications including Weekend FT, Management Today and broadcast on Radio 4.
 
Image courtesy of Edinburgh International Book Festival