Fast and Curious in China
Writing about a country that won’t slow down
For a novelist, setting a story in a place that changes at astonishing speed guarantees plenty of good material — but it does not make life easy.
The first time I visited China, in 1994, I was touring the Pudong district of Shanghai. Pudong is now an iconic image of China’s rise to wealth, with its Blade Runner-like array of skyscrapers facing the waterfront area known as the Bund across the Huangpu river, but at the time the only thing to observe was mud.
Bicycles still thronged the streets in Shanghai, although the city was developing amid the wave of economic liberalisation unleashed by Deng Xiaoping after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The western visitor had little to do in the evening apart from listen to the jazz band at the Peace Hotel and stroll along the dilapidated Bund. The French concession district hinted at J.G. Ballard’s wartime novel Empire of the Sun.
Our guide from Shanghai’s city government pointed to space that had been cleared for construction and told us that the plan was for a financial centre in Pudong to rival London, New York and Hong Kong. He showed us some drawings of what it envisaged. Oh yes? I thought. When will that ever happen?
Very soon, it transpired. Evan Osnos writes in his recent book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China: “Endless churn was the only constant. When a Chinese friend asked which American cities to visit . . . I suggested New York and he responded as tactfully as he could, ‘Every time I go, it looks the same.’ In Beijing, I never passed up an invitation because places, and people, vanished before you had a chance to see them again.”
As Osnos observes, the decades since China started its process of economic reform and opening up in 1978 have a parallel in the breathtaking speed at which the U.S. economy transformed in the second half of the 19th century. Rapid industrialisation and the social change it brings provides a wealth of material for writers, as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope found.
My trip to China two decades ago was the first of many. I have taken every excuse and invitation to go back, for the reason Osnos gives: that change is so swift, you miss it if you blink. Wherever I have gone, from the Central Party School in Beijing, to electronics factories in the Pearl River delta, to a vast steel works in Wuhan, China is always surprising.
That is why I set The Ghost Shift, my new novel, in Guangdong and Hong Kong. It is a thriller about a young woman in the Communist Party’s anti-graft unit, the Commission for Discipline Inspection, who investigates the deaths of workers at a factory in Guangdong and is pulled into a world of high-level corruption and surveillance.
But perpetual cultural change also posed a huge challenge for me. Reality never stands still for long enough in China for it to be encapsulated and described. By the time the research has been finished and the book is written and published, it runs the severe risk of being out of date. Even a novel which treats reality as the raw material for creativity has the difficulty of being based on shifting sands.
China has inspired fine non-fiction books, including Factory Girls (2008) by Leslie Chang and The Party (2010) by Richard McGregor. But its shifting and fragmented nature is one reason why collections of stories about different people trying to navigate a way through society, such as Osnos’s Age of Ambition and The Corpse Walker (2008) by Liao Yiwu, capture it best.
It is no surprise that some of the most popular western novels about China, such as Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls series, are set in the past, which is complex but at least static. Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), often writes about women from China’s 1949 revolutionary generation and their American immigrant offspring.
Chinese novelists face the additional challenge of the state censors. Murong Xuecun, author of Leave Me Alone (2002), who wrote eloquently about life for young people in boring jobs in Chinese cities such as Chengdu, has faced clampdowns, including a social media ban. Chan Koonchung, the Shanghai-born novelist, took an original approach by setting The Fat Years (2009) in the future, but it was still not published in China.
My experience of China’s speed occurred as I was doing background research for The Ghost Shift. In Hong Kong, I interviewed corporate intelligence consultants working for U.S. companies that were trying to prevent intellectual property being stolen by Chinese competitors. I also wanted my story to feature a high-ranking Chinese official who poses a threat to Beijing.
As I started writing in 2012, I suddenly found the downfall of Bo Xilai, the Party boss in the city of Chongqing and China’s closest equivalent to a western politician, on the front pages. Bo was accused of corruption, expelled from the Party and disgraced, and Gu Kailai, his wife, was implicated in the killing of Neil Heywood, a British business consultant. You could not make it up — and I say that because I had tried.
The following year, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency and its internet surveillance activities. As part of my research, I had spent time studying what the NSA did, and the role of the Chinese state in cyber-espionage. It turned out that I could simply have waited to be told.
It is a formidable problem for a novelist to find that society is moving so rapidly — but also a bonus. What could be more interesting in a drama than a backdrop in which anything can happen , and often does? Ultimately, what matters is not whether it reflects current events but whether works as a story.
Still, it reminds me of that day in Pudong and being unable to grasp how fast Shanghai would turn into a new city. Reality was about to trump my imagination.
John Gapper is a columnist for the Financial Times.
The Ghost Shift, by John Gapper, is published by Ballantine Books.
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