A dystopian vision of China
Authors: Julia Lovell
Journal: The Lancet (2013)

Ma Jian—probably the most successful Chinese exile writer in the UK—has been notably tough on China in his previous novels. The Noodle Maker (2004) denounced the hypocrisy and vulgarity of contemporary China as it abandoned communism for capitalism. Beijing Coma (2008) revisited in painstaking detail the Communist Party's bloody suppression of prodemocracy protests in 1989. But Ma Jian's earlier books seem almost sinophile when compared with the overwhelming bleakness of The Dark Road. In his new novel, Ma Jian focuses on the implementation of the one child policy, the population control measure introduced by the Chinese Government in 1978. The story follows two peasants—Kongzi and Meili—in their desperate quest to have a son to join their daughter Nannan. A descendant of Confucius, Kongzi is fixated on having a male heir to carry on his famous line. While Meili is in the early stages of an unauthorised second pregnancy, however, their village is stormed by family planning officials who enforce government policy on single births—carrying out third-trimester abortions, extracting fines from parents with more than one child, arresting or beating to death those who resist. To escape the crackdown, Kongzi and Meili become family planning fugitives. They make their way south through a dystopically heartless and polluted China to Guangdong, China's factory heartland, and survive by hiring themselves out as casual labour. As members of China's exploited mass of rural migrants, they are continually mistreated—variously robbed, beaten, raped (in Meili's case), and arrested—while Meili struggles under appalling conditions to have a second child. Her second pregnancy is aborted at 8 months (despite being given a massive uterine injection of formaldehyde, the baby is born alive, before being finally strangled by the operating doctor). Her third baby, a girl, is born with eleven fingers and a brain tumour—perhaps, the novel suggests, due to ambient pollution. Not long after the birth, Kongzi sells the baby to a human-trafficking "Welfare Office", which in turn sells her on to a begging cartel. Ma Jian reaches for magical realism to narrate the fourth pregnancy: the baby—gestating for 6 years while Meili strips copper out of computer cables on a waste-processing site—finally emerges as "green and shiny as an apple". Although life is cheap in Ma Jian's China, the savvy can still make cash out of it. The one child policy, the novel implies, was invented as a money-spinner for the Communist Party, which rakes in fines for policy violations and fees for forced abortions and fitting intrauterine devices. In The Dark Road, aborted fetuses and placentas are sold as delicacies; abandoned children are peddled for large sums to gullible foreigners, or are set to work begging (after having had their limbs deliberately broken, to increase sympathy from passers-by). The Dark Road, Ma Jian and his publisher have asserted, is based on extensive primary research in China. Before writing it, Ma Jian went undercover first as an official reporter to visit hospitals where late-term abortions took place, and then as a migrant labourer, living alongside real fugitives from the one child policy in south China. Ma Jian seems constantly anxious to embed his book in reality, cramming his pages with references to tragedies and injustices from China's present and recent past: he cites the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of 1989, the persecution of Falungong, forced demolitions, the dislocations of the Three Gorges dam, the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, hazardous pollution levels, food adulteration and the babymilk scandal of 2008, and labour-camp prisoners making cheap knick-knacks for western consumers. But if Ma Jian sets so much store by his book's claims to realism, it is perhaps worth wondering why he decided to write this material up as fiction, rather than as reportage. Aside from its final leap into fantasy during Meili's fourth pregnancy, the novel is for the most part written in a spare, matter-of-fact tone that rarely makes use of the stylistic flourishes that the freedom of the novel permits. By choosing fiction, Ma Jian leaves the reader uncomfortably wondering where fact ends and fabrication begins. Gauging the book's factual accuracy is important because The Dark Road radiates a misanthropy towards China that is terrifying in its absoluteness. If the novel's relentless desolation is indeed a true reflection of life in China today, this is a country with which one can hardly imagine engaging: a political system that subjects its poor, under-educated majority to an inhuman, toxic capitalism, that turns men into chauvinistic brutes, women into sex-slaves, and doctors into murderers and cannibals.