Masters of Subservience

The Chinese author Wang Xiaofang learned to write corruption exposés the hard way. His decade as a pen-pushing civil servant culminated in a three-year investigation for corruption while his boss, the deputy mayor of the rust-belt city of Shenyang, was executed for gambling away $3.6 million of public money in Macau’s casinos.

Wang was eventually exonerated, but this history adds a frisson of reality to the 13 novels he’s written, each of which details Machiavellian office politicking along the corridors of local government. Did Wang really hide a block of money from anticorruption investigators, as did one of his characters? He’s loath to address his personal experience, but he calls China’s anticorruption efforts the equivalent of thieves catching thieves. “My boss was given a lethal injection,” he told me in November. “And the person who investigated the case, a senior official in the provincial anticorruption bureau, was given a first-class merit citation. But later he too was caught, and was found to be even more corrupt than my boss.”

In China, “bureaucracy lit” is a hot genre, far outselling spy stories and whodunits as the airport novel of choice. In these tales of overweening ambition, the plot devices that set readers’ pulses racing are underhanded power plays, hidden alliances and devious sexual favors. The current craze began in 1999 with “Ink Painting,” by Wang Yuewen, and has become so intense that last year a deputy bureau chief who writes a series under the pseudonym Xiaoqiao Laoshu was named China’s 17th-richest author. “Officialdom lit” is hugely popular, not just as a peek behind the curtains, but also as a go-to guide for aspiring cadres in search of their own sycophancy strategies.

“I never thought I would drink urine for a full five years,” reflects one unfortunate flunky on his attempts to ingratiate himself with his boss in the opening scene of Wang Xiaofang’s “Civil Servant’s Notebook,” which has sold more than 100,000 copies in China since its publication in 2009 and has just been published as an e-book in English. “Urine is a metaphor for the culture of officialdom that has existed in China for thousands of years,” Wang told me. “Urine is the garbage excreted from people’s bodies. And this book is an attack on the culture of officialdom.” Bribery, he explained, is ingrained in every aspect of Chinese culture. “When devotees go to worship Buddha, they don’t cleanse their souls, like Christians confessing their sins in church,” he said. “They kneel down and donate money to the collection box, to bribe the Buddha.”

It might seem surprising that China allows the publication of such books. One typical passage in Wang’s book reads, “The main thing is the ‘rule of corruption’: helping the horse both to race and also to get a mouthful of hay.” It goes on to say: “It’s what all civil servants are secretly thinking. Our expectations for our civil servants are far too high, far too grandiose. The pressure is more than their flesh-and-blood bodies can stand.” But for China’s censors, unschooled in nuance or allegory, so long as corruption is punished by the ending, bureaucracy lit can work as a modern morality tale, nominally allowing writers to cleave to the role intended by Chairman Mao, who in a famous speech in 1942 declared, “Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.”

However, as China undergoes a transition of power, censors have tightened their grip. Wang has not put out a new book in two years, with publishers refusing to release his three most recent novels. Despite tighter censorship over the last couple of years, since the 2009 introduction of China’s microblog service, Weibo, Chinese Internet users have been awash in a tidal wave of scandals, usually involving some combination of misbehaving officials, naked women, blackmail and luxury goods. The country’s best authors — including Mo Yan, Su Tong and Yu Hua — have long skewered the petty corruption, venality and violence of grass-roots-level officials. But the literary conundrum running parallel to China’s warp-speed development and culture of impunity is that real life outpaces fiction in its absurdity. China’s authors, already marginalized by strict censorship, may risk irrelevance.

The trifling plots of bureaucracy lit look positively petty compared with the grand crimes surrounding the downfall of one of China’s highest-flying politicians, Bo Xilai, formerly the Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, whose wife was found guilty of murdering a former British business partner. Bo’s wife — or a woman rumored to be her plumper stand-in — was given a suspended death sentence, while Bo’s former police chief got 15 years for abuse of power, corruption and defection. Bo himself is facing a criminal investigation into charges including abuse of power, corruption, improper sexual relationships and possible involvement in covering up a murder. It’s hard for any novelist to compete.

Meanwhile, the insta-fortunes created by China’s skyrocketing real estate market have fed a nouveau riche culture in which materialism reigns supreme. When the author Yu Hua wrote his novel “Brothers” in 2005, he lampooned a beauty contest for virgins that spawned a market for artificial hymens. The lewd, rambunctious two-volume epic sold more than a million copies even as it was criticized for being a “trash heap” of “repulsive, low-class writing.” Fast-forward seven years and China’s Internet was afire with the story that an unnamed billionaire was offering $800,000 for a virgin bride. Should any of the contestants need an artificial hymen, these are readily available on China’s Internet. Indeed, the topic of which brand of artificial hymen is most convincing is also energetically debated online, in a discussion forum with 20,000 members.

“The problem I’m facing now is that China’s reality is already hyperreal,” Yu told me. “Whatever weirdness you write in your stories won’t be as weird as the reality.” This reverberates across genres, true not just of Yu’s satirical world of scoundrels and tricksters, but also of the blackest depths of bureaucratic torment.

“I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this,” said Liu Xia, the wife of the jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, when she described, in tears, her past two years under house arrest. She has never been accused of any crime, yet she is guarded at all times except for — in a farcical touch — one recent day, when her guards bunked off for a lunch break and journalists seized the chance to sneak into her apartment.

China’s new laureate, Mo Yan, lauded by the Nobel committee for his “hallucinatory realism,” may soon be living in his very own hallucinatory reality. Following his triumph, local authorities announced plans to build a Mo Yan Culture Experience in his hometown, Gaomi, the dusty, rural inspiration for his novels. This $107 million “holy land for Chinese literature” would encompass his childhood home, said a local official, who, according to the Beijing news, told Yan’s 90-year-old father: “Your son is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house. It does not really matter if you agree or not.” The government also proposed the planting of 1,600 acres of red sorghum in honor of Yan’s celebrated book, even though local farmers stopped growing the unprofitable crop three decades ago.

The gargantuan irony of paying such tribute to an author who immortalizes the struggle of the ordinary man against corrupt, unfeeling officials is presumably lost on bureaucrats schooled in the art of subservience. Should it go forward, the inadvertent monument to official hypocrisy might just epitomize this era of absurd excess. As Wang put it in “The Civil Servant’s Notebook”: “Thousands of years of worshiping power has dealt a mortal wound to Chinese culture. That’s hypocrisy and falsehood. The habit of falsehood is fatal to a culture. But to us, falsehood is the essence.”