Fragile China

By HOWARD W. FRENCH  

Wall Street Journal 2012-2-4

What becomes of a nation when it attains its long-harbored goal of surpassing the world's longtime economic leader?

Recent history offers two imperfect but instructive examples. In the early 20th century, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany interpreted its sprint past Britain as license to reshape the world in its image—by force.

Several decades later Japan began conquering the world with its goods, briefly surpassing the U.S., at least in per capita nominal GDP. This prompted much hand-wringing in the West about how to keep up with this new economic juggernaut and its rapidly acquired wealth. Almost as quickly as it had risen, though, in the 1990s Japan embarked on an extended navel-gazing walkabout from which it has never really returned.

Both of these episodes have been explored thoroughly in literature. But "The Fat Years," an inventive and highly topical novel by Chan Koonchung, is among the first to explore a scenario that much of the world is speculating about today: What happens once China can boast having the world's top economy? His descriptions of the excesses of contemporary China—the book is set in the very near future of 2013—are so vivid that the book was banned in China when it was first published in 2009, and the background of world economic crisis has the immediacy of journalism, a setup to which Mr. Chan adds a speculative dystopian twist.

Mr. Chan, who was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, mentions no historical precedents, but anyone familiar with the Japanese experience will notice similarities to the brief years of Japan's flirtation with being the world's most successful, if not largest, economy.

Beginning in the 1960s, Japanese leaders rang in each new year with celebrations of the country's fast-rising GDP. But 20 years later, with no one left to catch up with, the country woke up deprived of motivation and purpose. Amid this new emptiness, all that was left was the forced celebration of self, or Japanese-ness, and the use of deep pockets to chase conspicuous and increasingly decadent consumption.

Mr. Chan's China shares some of these traits. Art galleries become celebrated for their size, not for the quality of their collections, much less what any particular collection has to say. His characters satisfy themselves with the rarest French vintages or drive around Beijing in Audi SUVs, which in the era of new wealth count as relatively discreet. For one mercenary female character, the best men of Europe are no longer sufficient; it is now China where the best and brightest, not to mention the richest, trophy mates are to be found.

China, in the novel, is distinctly different from Japan in one respect. Hollow triumphalism is not enough. The country retains big ambitions, including the aim to usher in an age of "post-Westernism and post-universalism." It has abruptly moved from a place that obsesses about stability and harmony to a state where happiness is the near-universal norm, feeding its belief that its values trump those of the West.

Yet a few of his characters are able to perceive that something is amiss. Most notably, the month on the calendar when the world transitioned from the old Western-dominated order to the officially proclaimed Chinese "Golden Age of Prosperity" has gone missing.

A central character ponders the proliferation of erasures when he goes to a large Beijing bookstore and notes the absence of anything controversial, or even complex, about the country's past.

During the long years of radical socialism, he says, "everyone knew that the true facts were being suppressed." By contrast, nowadays "there is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It's just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read."

In his basic premise, which concerns a state of mass, collective amnesia—perhaps chemically induced—Mr. Chan draws heavily from Orwell's "1984." The stories of the few who have escaped this fate animate the plot, as they search one another out amid the zombified masses.

The profound question that this novel contemplates is just how far power can be decoupled from ideas, starting with knowledge of oneself and one's own history. As China continues to rise while working hard to control information and mold its people's thought, it is a question that many will be asking.

—Mr. French, who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is writing a book about China's relationship with Africa.