The Wolf Totem and Tibet
Last November, retired Beijing professor Jiang Rong's debut novel, Wolf Totem, won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. The book has broken all records in China, selling one million copies in the first year alone — along with six million black market copies. It's now the second-most read work in China after Mao's little Red Book.
Set in the 1960s, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Wolf Totem tells the story of Chen Zen, a Beijing intellectual who goes to live in a remote settlement in Inner Mongolia. He learns that the nomadic Mongols have built their lives around a "religion" in which the fates of the earth, man and the wolf are inextricably linked. Chen Zhen's interest in the wolf cult turns into an obsession; he traps a wolf cub and raises it himself. He lives happily with the Mongols until the Han Chinese arrive and begin to exterminate the wolves in the interests of "modernity". The delicate triangular balance that has been maintained for thousands of years is destroyed and leads to the extinction of the wolves and Mongol culture. With the wolves gone, rats become a plague and shepherd-less wild sheep graze the grasslands bare. The ensuing dust storms from the Mongolian desert wheel in over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the sun and moon.
Sounds like a book that should be banned, eh? But instead of being banned, Chinese business leaders and the People's Liberation Army are actually urging people to read it. Why? George Walden, who witnessed the Cultural Revolution as a British diplomat in China, says that the book's wolf motif is more nationalistic than ecological. The legendary founders of Rome were raised by a she-wolf notes Chen, who then says: "The later Teutons, Germans and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood.'' Walden's review of the book at Bloomberg News makes for disconcerting reading. Equally disconcerting for the aspiring wolves, though, is James Fallows on poverty and superpower status.
It doesn't take much imagination to see Wolf Totem as a fable of modern times. For Mongolia then, read Tibet now.
