China Dream
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times).
Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.
Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.
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.
