He recalled a time when he took inspiration from the dissidents of the Eastern Bloc: “Fifteen years ago, we were talking about Havel.” These days, he told me with a wince, “people don’t want to say anything.” By the time we stood to leave, he had drained four Martinis.Īt the age of seventy, Xi has removed term limits on his rule and eliminated even loyal opponents. This summer, I had a drink with an intellectual I’ve known for years. But, in the alleys, most of the improvised cafés and galleries that used to enliven the city have been cleared away, in the name of order overhead, the race to build new skyscrapers, which attracted designers from around the world, has stalled. The streets of Beijing still show progress armadas of electric cars glide by like props in a sci-fi film, and the smoke that used to impose a perpetual twilight is gone. ![]() When I return to China these days, the feeling of ineluctable ascent has waned. At a celebration for a new art museum, an international crowd peered up at a troupe of Spanish avant-garde performers dangling from a construction crane, writhing like flies in a web-just another evening in what a writer at the scene called “the unstoppable ascension of Chinese art.” When I lived in Beijing from 2005 to 2013, the social calendar was punctuated by openings: concert halls, laboratories, architectural marvels. The private sector generated fortunes intellectuals aired dissent on campuses and social media the middle class travelled and indulged. Above all, the Party sought to project confidence: Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, visited the New York Stock Exchange, in 1997, rang the opening bell, and boomed, in English, “I wish you good trading!”įor two decades after Deng made his deal with the people, the Party largely held to it. Young people were trying on new identities I met a Chinese band that played only American rock, though their repertoire was so limited that they sang “Hotel California” twice a night. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era he called for “courageous experiments” to insure that China would not be like “a woman with bound feet.” Soon, new N.G.O.s were lobbying for the rights of women and ethnic minorities, and foreign investors were funding startups, including Alibaba and Tencent, that grew into some of the wealthiest companies on earth. It survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had risked falling into oblivion, behind its comrades in Moscow. But the political context was also crucial. How did Wang become a literary icon in a country famed for its constraint? It helped that he was adroit at crafting narratives just oblique enough to elude the censors. His widow, the sociologist Li Yinhe, once told me, “I know a lesbian couple who met for the first time when they went to pay their respects at his grave site.” She added, “There are plenty of people with minds like this.” To him, that stricture implied an unbearable lie: “if the ultimate truth has already been discovered, then the only thing left for humanity to do would be to judge everything based on this truth.” Long after his death, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-four, Wang’s views still circulate among fans like a secret handshake. In “The Pleasure of Thinking,” the title essay in a collection newly released in English, he recalls his time on a commune where the only sanctioned reading was Mao’s Little Red Book. ![]() Wang’s fiction and essays celebrated personal dignity over conformity, and embraced foreign ideas-from Twain, Calvino, Russell-as a complement to the Chinese perspective. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex-“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.” Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo.
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