China Dream

A biting satire of Chinese totalitarianism from the critically acclaimed author of Beijing Coma and Red Dust.

A master of inimitable humour. Always hilarious, thought-provoking, and immensely moving

A biting and humane novel of stunning concision... Bleakly funny, incisive, stinging and – in its most destabilising passages – gut-wrenching

Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

A savage satire of Chinese authoritarianism and censorship... Believable and brutal, this is Ma Jian’s boldest…most elegiac work’

Mr Ma's critique of the totalitarian mindset recalls that of Soviet-era dissidents...tragic and elegiac...garnished with both horror and tenderness... A hand-grenade of a book

This must be one of the liveliest novels about brainwashing ever written… For all the horror, Ma sees freedom in confronting the true nightmare of the past, perceiving that it is the only way to liberate our futures

Creepily Orwellian... makes Mao’s Cultural Revolution look like minor tinkering

Crackles with bruising satire …China Dream may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China. He is the author of seven novels, a travel memoir, three story collections and two essay collections. He has been translated into twenty-six languages. Since the publication of his first book in 1987, all his work has been banned in China. He now lives in exile in London

‘One of China’s greatest living novelists’ Guardian 
 
Blending fact with fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, his nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. 
 
This darkly comic fable is a dystopian vision of repression and state-enforced amnesia set not in the future, but in China today. 
 
‘Excoriating…Not for nothing has Ma been called both the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature’ A Financial Times Book of the Year 
 
‘Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegot, sort of: powerful!’ 
Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

The Dark Road

From the author of Beijing Coma, a compelling and shocking novel about the dark heart of China's One Child Policy. 
 
Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014.

The Dark Road follows the river-borne escape of fugitives from the one-child policy. An ill-matched couple’s flight along anarchic backwaters leads them into a raw, brutal, brilliantly depicted boom-time underworld

[Ma Jian’s] characterization is superb… A devastating critique of China’s oppressive communist regime

A writer of rare orgininality... All of Ma’s skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world

One of China’s most prominent dissident voices addresses the bleak effects of the one-child policy in this striking novel, in which the brutality of social engineering is made graphically plain. Ma Jian’s work is banned in China; this unflinching portrait of one woman’s struggle against oppression makes it sadly easy to understand why

Ma’s work is a vital corrective and he writes here with insistent, focused anger

Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the last 30 years

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. 
 
For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

Red Dust

Celebrated Chinese writer Ma Jian sets off on an extraordinary journey around China in search of himself and his country. 
 
Winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Award

Enthralling... He depicts a land of extraordinary physical beauty and interest and his prose is always elegant. Read this book for its human truthfulness and for unforgettable moments

Red Dust is a tour de force, a powerfully picaresque cross between the sort of travel book any Western author would give his eye-teeth to write, and a disturbing confession

It opens windows on landscapes small and vast, all still largely unobserved and unknown to Westerners

Honest, raw, insightful... The Chinese equivalent of On the Road

[Ma's] powers of description make every page buzz with life... Someone who could rank among the great travel writers

His narrative is blessed with a prose style that compresses meaning as succinctly as Chinese calligraphy

Like a Chinese Jack Kerouac...his book is a riveting record of how he tried to make sense of his new experiences

An unflinching account of a three-year journey by an insider who feels like an outsider in his native China

A Sino-beatnik travelogue, [and] a fascinating search for self

Ma captures the feel of wandering off China's beaten track, which is to say most of the country, far from the tour buses and souvenir stands

A rare peep at everyday life behind the Chinese iron curtain

In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. With his long hair, jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance from his work unit and the police, as Deng Xiaoping clamped down on 'Spiritual Pollution'. His ex-wife was seeking custody of their daughter; his girlfriend was sleeping with another man; and he could no longer find the inspiration to write or paint. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China and set off in search of himself. 
 
Ma Jian's journey would last three years and take him to deserts and overpopulated cities, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquillity and beauty. The result is an utterly unique insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider and an outsider in his own country could have written.

The Noodle Maker

'Playful and wonderfully dark, The Noodle Maker confirms Ma Jian as a Chinese Kundera. The funniest book I've read in a long time' Philip Marsden

Deep black humour...owes a debt to Italo Calvino

Ma's writing shines a light that is both humane and angry into some of the dustiest corners of a closed and often forgotten society

Playful and wonderfully dark...a Chinese Kundera

Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his 'art', the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. 
 
Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission: the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives...

Stick Out Your Tongue

The hugely influential book that set Ma Jian on the road to exile from China. 
 
'Outstanding' Irish Times

Exquisite, earthy stories... Ma writes brilliantly

At the heart of Ma Jian's stories, there is both humanity and a piercing, if painful, literary truth

Ma Jian...creates a stunning vision of a culture too easily and dangerously airbrushed into the ideals of others

All [these stories] are fascinating windows on the soul of a dying people

Deadpan yet shot through with subtle empathy and flashes of humour, surreal and unearthly yet steeped in a physicality so immediate that I flinched on at least one occasion. Beautiful...lean style...not a single wasted word...oustanding

A Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover to the walls of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between fact and fiction becomes confused and the man is drawn deep into an alien culture he knew nothing about, and which haunts his dreams. 
 
Banned in China in 1987, Stick Out Your Tongue, is the hugely influential book that set Ma Jian on the road to exile.

Ma Jian

Flora Drew

This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated by Flora Drew

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction

A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated

In scene after scene of black satire, lyric tenderness and desolating tragedy…this fearless epic of history and memory establishes the exiled Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world-domination’

Monumental...riveting. This vivid, pungent, often blackly funny book is a mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence

Powerful and exhilirating... Simultaneously a large-scale portrait of citizens writing in the grip of the party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory

A modern literary masterpiece ... Ma Jian has created an intense, passionate and painful-to-read parable for today.. The elegant and bravura writing of Ma Jian is utterly convincing

REPUBLISHED ON THE 30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE, WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR AND A NEW COVER BY AI WEIWEI 
 
Beijing Coma is Ma Jian’s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, it takes the life, and near-death, of one young student to create a dazzling and excoriating novel about contemporary China 
 
‘Monumental’ Guardian 
 
‘A landmark work of fiction’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A modern literary masterpiece’ Sunday Express 
 
Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his student days at Beijing University. 
 
As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. 
 
‘Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century’ Chris Patten

Ma Jian

Praise for Beijing Coma

This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated b ...

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of ...

A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated

This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated b ...

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of ...

A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated

This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated b ...

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of ...

A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated

Books by Ma Jian

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter