China Looks Askance at a New Satiric Novel

It's the year 2013: China has emerged triumphant from a second global financial crisis, more confident than ever that the Western model is broken and that its own brand of authoritarian capitalism is superior. Starbucks-Wang Wang cafes (the Seattle company was bought out) are making Chinese-themed drinks popular around the globe. The dollar depreciates 30%, gold skyrockets to $2,000 an ounce and China takes over the world.

This scenario, maybe not so far-fetched, is the theme of a Chinese novel, The Fat Years, now popular among the intellectual and media elite in China, despite the fact that it is not legally sold on the mainland. Downloadable over the Internet and available on request at some highbrow bookstores, The Fat Years has sold some 17,000 official copies in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and has reached thousands more readers online.

The author, Hong Kong citizen Chan Koon Chung, paints a dystopian view of China, tapping into the view that the nation is just a little too proud of itself. In the novel Chan has the government drug the water, making the populace forget a month of chaos and a brutal crackdown that restored order.

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