China Dream

Product Description

Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times).

Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!” by Margaret Atwood on Twitter,
China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people’s private dreams with President Xi Jinping’s great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode’s nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.

Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation’s soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth,
China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

Review

Praise for China Dream

Long–listed for the 2020 Best Translated Book AwardO, The Oprah Magazine, 1 of 25 Books to Give the World’s Best Dad on Father’s DayAn Entertainment Weekly New & Notable Hot Fiction TitleLibrary Journal, One of the Best Books of the Year in World LiteratureA Financial Times Best Book of the YearA The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Month and YearOne of Vulture’s Spring Books to Watch Out For

“Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!” —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

“Teaming up with fellow dissident Ai Weiwei, who created the book’s jacket artwork, Ma demonstrates once more the power of fiction to speak truth to those who would silence their critics.” —
Time, 1 of the 100 Must–Read Books of the Year

China Dream is a sharper political allegory than Mr. Ma’s earlier novels. It crackles with bruising satire of Chinese officialdom, and an acerbic wit that vaguely recalls Gary Shteyngart’s sendup of Russian oligarchs in
Absurdistan, or even Nikolai Gogol’s portraits of Russia’s provincial aristocrats in
Dead Souls . . .
China Dream may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings.”” —Mike Ives,
The New York Times

“Mr. Ma’s critique of the totalitarian mindset recalls that of Soviet–era dissidents . . . tragic and elegiac . . . garnished with both horror and tenderness.” —
The Economist

“Ma Jian has been a courageous critic of President Xi Jinping’s regime . . . Ma Daode, the main character, is director of the Chinese Dream Bureau, which is as creepily Orwellian as it sounds and makes Mao’s Cultural Revolution look like minor tinkering.” –Max Davidson,
The Irish Mail

“A short, highly satirical work no less excoriating than any of Ma’s previous fiction, translated in a graphic, stylish manner by [Flora] Drew, [the author’s wife and longtime translator].” —Catherine Taylor,
Financial Times

“Ma has a marksman’s eye for the contradictions of his country and his generation, and the responsibilities and buried dreams they carry. His perceptiveness, combined with a genius for capturing people who come from all classes, occupations, backgrounds and beliefs; for identifying the fallibility, comedy and despair of living in absurd times, has allowed him to compassionately detail China’s complex inner lives. Censoring his novels and banning his name have been Beijing’s cynical response to Ma’s artistry, and to the human lives that the novelist cannot forget, even as the Chinese Dream envelops them.”