Language lessons: Chinese authors worldwide must not ignore home

Author Chen Xiwo on the value of being published in translation, but why he mostly cares about his books being read by Chinese people

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I left China to go to Japan, but then I returned in order to write. One result of that was that I came in for a lot of stick from family and friends. They felt I was deliberately walking into trouble. But this is my country and these are hard times. I need to be here, to bear witness to the hard times, and to resist. So that’s why I’ve got involved in supporting people fighting for their legal rights, something a lot of people thought was a strange thing to do. Why would a writer get involved in politics? Well, I feel that writers are, to some degree, a bit like politicians in that they cannot leave their country, no matter how dangerous or hard life is, because that is where they “operate”. As soon as writers go into exile, they wither and die, like a tree without soil. Take Thomas Mann, for example. When he left Nazi Germany for United States in 1938, he confidently declared: “Where I am, there is Germany!” Unfortunately, his life as a writer withered from then on; Germany was not where he was but where Hitler was.

A comparison between writers and politicians may seem strange. But in a dictatorship such as China, politics is everywhere, it undermines basic human dignities, even threatens life itself. Chinese writers do not have the luxury of standing aloof from politics. They have to confront political questions first and foremost. If they do skirt around them, they are not true writers. In the UK, a writer without any political consciousness can still be a good one, but in China, a writer who lacks political consciousness is bogus.

The same goes for publishing. When I say that there is no freedom to write in China, I actually mean no freedom to publish. Of course one can write, but that writing means nothing if it ends up in a drawer. Writing is, after all, speaking out. The authorities in China know this perfectly well, so they enforce strict controls over publication. They do this by forcing publishers to ‘self-regulate’, that is, to act as their own censors.

Under these circumstances, it is, of course, a good thing that works can be published, and published in their entirety, outside China. However, any book of mine published outside China is set within China, where I “operate”, and there is no doubt that overseas readers can find it hard to comprehend what I am writing about. They may even not care very much. As I have said before, I can say what I want outside China, but how many people are listening? And how many of them understand what I am saying? This is the question we really need to ask.

It is the same with publishing. Since publishing is not free in China, a published writer who says he or she is “speaking out” is just talking nonsense. This is what it means to be a writer in China today. Huge numbers of books are published but they are not real literature.

Access to books and the internet are limited in China. Here, a man uses his iPad inside a Shanghai coffee shop

Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters

To be quite honest, when I talk to foreign readers, I often feel there is a gulf between us. This is inevitable, because we live in different cultures, and confront different problems and realities. There are foreign readers who care deeply about China’s problems but if they have not lived there, then China’s complex problems just seem impenetrably weird and hard to fathom. I can only convey very simple concepts to them. There are, of course, some Chinese writers who consciously aim their writing at a foreign readership, tailoring it to things they are interested in. The result is that much of what is published outside China is of questionable value.

Without question, Chinese writers should write primarily for Chinese readers, because only they can fully understand the life these stories describe. The best thing that can happen to a Chinese writer is that you write a sketch and the readers immediately get the subtleties of the joke and burst out laughing with you; or you have a dig at something and they get the point without needing any explanations, and you know that because you see the intuitive understanding in their eyes. Or you tell a story of suffering, and there is instant empathy, at the deepest emotional level.

I can say what I want outside China, but how many people are listening?

For a writer not to be published in their own country is the greatest tragedy they can face. But that is precisely the situation in China, one that genuine writers face all the time. So, for them, it is really important to be able to publish outside China. Firstly, it allows good writing which cannot come out in China, to see the light of day and be preserved. Secondly, these works may have an impact overseas and that impact will gradually percolate back to China. We live in the information age, and the internet is essential to this. Even though the communist party does its best to control the internet and blocks many foreign-based web sites, people have software that enables them to breach the party’s “Great Firewall”. Once they reach those sites, they read what has been published outside China.

For a writer not to be published in their own country is the greatest tragedy they can face

No thinking person in China trusts party propaganda any more. They prefer to believe news and information from overseas. It is worth pointing out that those who wield power in China do not believe the party line either. I know many party members, who privately say worse things about their party than ordinary non-party people do because, from their position at the centre of the system, they can see its evils only too clearly. They want to protect that system in order to protect their own vested interests. But their values are pro-Western. If they had the choice between a CCP-approved novel and a Chinese novel which was selling well outside China, they would undoubtedly go for the latter. So from this point of view, publishing overseas is important because there is a chance it will exert some influence even within official circles.