by Ma Jian
Chatto & Windus, 592pp, £17.99ALL DICTATORSHIPS ARE ALIKE IN that they try to rewrite history. China is no exception. Type in Tiananmen Square Massacre to Google from anywhere in the Middle Kingdom and you'll draw a
blank. The message is this: it never happened.
Hence the coma of Ma Jian's title, a powerful metaphor for a devastating diagnosis of China then and now. A monumental and magisterial act of historical memory, Beijing Coma recreates the events of the June 1989 massacre and the background leading up to it in minute detail, while managing to place it within a larger picture of the generational change that energised and propelled the young protestors.
Given that Ma Jian was an eyewitness to the occupation of Tiananmen Square, and is one of China's foremost dissident writers, one might have expected a heroic tale. Instead Jian brings to these events the same exact and remorseless eye which distinguished his other books. If Red Dust and Stick Out Your Tongue – both culled from his years travelling incognito around China and Tibet, one step ahead of the authorities – established an aesthetic which was both unsparing and unsentimental, Beijing Coma takes this to yet another level of realism in speaking of human nature and state power.
Dai Wei, his principle character, lies in a coma after being shot in the head when Tiananmen Square is finally cleared by the army. While his body wastes away, his mind races into overdrive, reliving his life. What emerges from this act of recollection and analysis is that, despite their undoubted courage, both he and his co-conspirators were hardly black-and-white heroes. Before drifting into university, Wei himself has been a salesman of pornographic cards, hair tonic and just about anything else that would turn him a buck. His father, a broken victim of repression recently returned from two decades in the camps, is merely a figure of derision to him. Like his fellow students, Wei, though conscious of the terrible excesses of Mao's cultural revolution, is motivated not so much by thoughts of revenge or justice as by the energy of youth denied its voice.
Nevertheless, as Wei gradually becomes politicised, he turns once again to his father's journals of the gulag, discovering in them the pure horror of China's recent past. The tales of cruelty and degradation he finds begin to form an ever more significant backdrop of disgust to the student protests and his personal commitment.
Jian's recreation of the process of revolt within the Beijing universities is a tour de force. Even if it is not an easy read, his picture of the swirling chaos, drive and naivety which propelled the students into the square rings true, as does the petty factionalism and self interest which characterised the occupation once it was in situ. Jian is good on the behaviour of crowds. One student joins the revolution because her computer crashed as the students were marching; much later she is found ironed flat against the road by a tank. Nor, in this tragic dialogue of the deaf, do the authorities know what they are doing. Caught completely unprepared, they first offer concessions and sympathy, only to come at last to their senses by reverting to type.
If anything, Jian's account of the aftermath is even more darkly bitter and ironically humorous. While the Chinese state mercilessly hunts down the students and their families, taking care to erase any memory of the massacre, Wei lies in the care of his increasingly unbalanced mother. In her desperation, she admits a succession of grotesques to Wei's bedside – those who believe his urine has magical properties, and a lodger who fellates Wei while president Jiang Zemin shouts about China's honour from the TV. Reduced to penury, she begins to sell off Wei's organs.
On the edge of starvation when his mother is arrested for her Falun Gong sympathies, Wei becomes the mirror image of the new China, a state with a vigorous body, and a fatally comatose mind.
The full article contains 680 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
