China Dream
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
‘One of China’s greatest living novelists’ Guardian
Blending fact with fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, his nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.
This darkly comic fable is a dystopian vision of repression and state-enforced amnesia set not in the future, but in China today.
‘Excoriating…Not for nothing has Ma been called both the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature’ A Financial Times Book of the Year
‘Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegot, sort of: powerful!’
Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exiled Chinese writer Ma's satirical novel (after The Dark Road) is a bold, searing indictment of present-day China and a lyrical expos of the false utopia created by the Communist Party and its current leader-for-life, Xi Jinping. Written "out of rage" according to Ma's foreword, the fable subverts the propaganda of Xi's Chinese Dream and chronicles the descent into madness of the louche, corrupt government functionary Ma Daode. Having played his part in the nasty factional violence of the Cultural Revolution, Ma has risen to become director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing all private dreams with the collective, great China Dream. But he is increasingly unable to control his own dreams: dreams of fallen comrades, a martyred girlfriend, and the pitiful demise of his parents after he himself denounced them. After a disastrous appearance at an antigovernment demonstration during which his neighbors throw chicken bones and condoms to protest the razing of their neighborhood, and having made a fool of himself in a speech at a Golden Anniversary Dream ceremony in which his dreams overcome him, Ma is suspended from his position. He goes on a desperate search for a cure, extracting the recipe for the miraculous Old Lady Dream's Broth, a hare-brained concoction of blood and tears he hopes will eradicate not only his, but all undesirable dreams. The book will surely be banned in China, as has Ma's other works. This is an inventive yet powerful confrontation of China's past and present.
