The sleep of democracy: <i>Beijing Coma</i> centres on the protests and massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The sleep of democracy: <i>Beijing Coma</i> centres on the protests and massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Cultural revelation?



Ma Jian is certainly not lacking in ambition. But in trying to create the Great Chinese Novel, he’s written the little man out of history, argues Michael Donohue.

Beijing Coma
Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew
Chatto and Windus
Dh130

When a novelist sets out to write something truly ambitious - something that might get called, say, "the defining work of its age" - it doesn't hurt to include a few scenes from whatever massacre, riot, or invasion has already defined that age. Flaubert knew that if his Sentimental Education contained some episodes from the 1848 uprising in Paris, the book would have a stronger claim to being "the moral history of the men of my generation". Milan Kundera gave extra weight to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by setting it during the Prague Spring of 1968. Doctor Zhivago falls for Lara against the backdrop of Russia's Civil War - and suddenly it's much more than a regular love affair.

Ma Jian's new novel, Beijing Coma, is as ambitious as they come, for it wants to be nothing short of a Tiananmen Square epic - a sweeping tale of the protests that shook China's capital for six weeks in 1989, then ended with a bloody military reaction on June 4. Nothing in the country's recent history matches the tragic significance of this massacre, so a book with this backdrop can't avoid coming off as an attempt at "The Great Chinese Novel", or at least a full-scale examination of the first generation to come of age in the post-Mao era. The setting also guarantees the book won't be published inside China, which Ma left in 1987 (he now lives in London).

The novel unfolds in the mind of Dai Wai, who in the chaos of June 4 is struck in the head by a policeman's bullet. Throughout the 1990s, while lying in bed covered in tubes - appearing unconscious, but actually able to hear everything around him - Dai reviews his life, beginning with his birth in 1966: "It's me. I've crawled out between my mother's legs, my head splitting with pain." He's lucky to have been conceived at all: his father, a victim of the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s, rarely gets permission to leave his "reform-through-labour" camp and visit his family in Beijing.

Under the cloud of his father's imprisonment, Dai Wai grows up in an opera company work unit where any politically incorrect behaviour, such as his sexual adventures with a girl named Lulu, can attract the wrath of authority. One day during the Cultural Revolution - the radical purge of "bourgeois" elements that lasted from 1966 until Mao's death in 1976 - Dai watches some Red Guards murder an old woman by dousing her head in boiling water.

By the early 1980s, when Dai moves to Guangzhou to attend university, Deng Xiaoping has come to power, and everything has changed. Thousands of prisoners, including Dai's father, have been released from labour camps, and the country has opened relations with the West and even begun to liberalise its economy. Encouraged by all this, Dai and his classmates want even more reform. "China had emerged from the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution," he explains, "and we were eager to build our country up again. We were fired by a sense of mission." He stays up late arguing with his friends about politics and corruption and Freud, and gets his heart broken by a girl from Hong Kong. By 1986 he's back in the capital as a Ph.D. student at Beijing University - where he falls in with the eventual student leaders of Tiananmen.

From there - and there are more than 400 pages left - Ma Jian devotes the great bulk of the novel to a nearly day-by-day account of the 1989 protests, from the mid-April death of the reform-minded ex-official Hu Yaobang (which started everything) right up to the violent end. As thousands fill the square, the student leaders - many of them real figures with minutely altered names - spend most of the time arguing with each other. Rumours fly. Romance blooms. A hunger strike ensues. The furious Ke Xi, a thinly disguised version of the real student leader Wu'er Kaixi, criticises Premier Li Peng on national television. Martial law is declared. The papier-maché "goddess of democracy" statue goes up - and so on, until the tanks arrive.

And here lies the problem of Beijing Coma. Where so many other writers have used well-known events as backdrops to fictional tales - giving the private sphere a dynamic relation with the political one - Ma spends so much time painting his setting that he loses sight of the story that's supposed to take place in it. We're inundated with so much trivial detail from the protests that Dai Wai's personal story gets lost. It's as if Tolstoy, in War and Peace, had forgotten about Pierre Bezukhov because he focused too much on artillery tactics.

Despite giving so much space to the protests themselves, Ma never adequately shows why the students were willing to risk their whole futures, even their lives, to participate in the demonstration. The novel is equally vague on the post-Tiananmen era. Trapped in his coma, Dai Wai listens as China embraces capitalism. Cell phones and the internet arrive. His mother goes broke taking care of him, joins Falun Gong, and gets arrested. She learns their apartment is about to be razed to make room for a mall. An old friend from the Square arrives to say that the Tiananmen generation has been "crushed and silenced. If we don't take a stand now, we will be erased from the history books". We're clearly meant to see that it's not just Dai Wai, but all of China, that's slipped into a coma; but Ma's allegory has the unfortunate result of leaving its narrator blind - which is not a convenient way to observe contemporary China.

Beijing Coma shows us that the Tiananmen protesters were idealistic and rash, that the government acted badly and that crony capitalism prevailed in China. But Ma might have explored some of the things we don't know - what a soldier felt as he machine-gunned civilians; what a government moderate said to his wife at breakfast; what, exactly, made those hardliners so unrelentingly hard. The defining event of its age, re-imagined from multiple perspectives, with fresh speculations on the motives of everyone involved - it would make for a truly ambitious novel.

Michael Donohue lives in Beijing. He won a 2007 National Magazine Award for his essay Russell and Mary.

The years Ramadan fell in May

1987

1954

1921

1888

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Starring: Alia Bhatt, Vedang Raina, Manoj Pahwa, Harsh Singh
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Moral education needed in a 'rapidly changing world'

Moral education lessons for young people is needed in a rapidly changing world, the head of the programme said.

Alanood Al Kaabi, head of programmes at the Education Affairs Office of the Crown Price Court - Abu Dhabi, said: "The Crown Price Court is fully behind this initiative and have already seen the curriculum succeed in empowering young people and providing them with the necessary tools to succeed in building the future of the nation at all levels.

"Moral education touches on every aspect and subject that children engage in.

"It is not just limited to science or maths but it is involved in all subjects and it is helping children to adapt to integral moral practises.

"The moral education programme has been designed to develop children holistically in a world being rapidly transformed by technology and globalisation."

Moon Music

Artist: Coldplay

Label: Parlophone/Atlantic

Number of tracks: 10

Rating: 3/5

MATCH INFO

Chelsea 0

Liverpool 2 (Mane 50', 54')

Red card: Andreas Christensen (Chelsea)

Man of the match: Sadio Mane (Liverpool)

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Started: Soft launch in November, 2020

Founders: Sagar Chandiramani, Jatin Sharma and Monish Chandiramani

Based: Dubai

Industry: E-grocery

Initial investment: $150,000

Future plan: Raise $1.5m and enter Saudi Arabia next year

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Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
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AiFlux – renewables, oil and gas

DevisionX – manufacturing

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Greener Crop – agriculture

Ipera.ai – space digitisation

Lune Technologies – fibre-optics

Monak – delivery

NutzenTech – environment

Nybl – machine learning

Occicor – shelf management

Olymon Solutions – smart automation

Pivony – user-generated data

PowerDev – energy big data

Sav – finance

Searover – renewables

Swftbox – delivery

Trade Capital Partners – FinTech

Valorafutbol – sports and entertainment

Workfam – employee engagement

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Favourite piece of music: Verdi’s Requiem. It’s awe-inspiring.

Biggest inspiration: My father, as I grew up in a house where music was constantly played on a wind-up gramophone. I had amazing music teachers in primary and secondary school who inspired me to take my music further. They encouraged me to take up music as a profession and I follow in their footsteps, encouraging others to do the same.

Favourite book: Ian McEwan’s Atonement – the ending alone knocked me for six.

Favourite holiday destination: Italy - music and opera is so much part of the life there. I love it.

match info

Athletic Bilbao 1 (Muniain 37')

Atletico Madrid 1 (Costa 39')

Man of the match  Iker Muniain (Athletic Bilbao)

THE BIO:

Sabri Razouk, 74

Athlete and fitness trainer 

Married, father of six

Favourite exercise: Bench press

Must-eat weekly meal: Steak with beans, carrots, broccoli, crust and corn

Power drink: A glass of yoghurt

Role model: Any good man

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Engine: Dual 180kW and 300kW front and rear motors

Power: 480kW

Torque: 850Nm

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Brief scores:

Toss: Australia, chose to bat

Australia: 272-9 (50 ov)

Khawaja 100, Handscomb 52; Bhuvneshwar 3-48

India: 237 (50 ov)

Rohit 56, Bhuvneshwar 46; Zampa 3-46

Player of the Match: Usman Khawaja (Australia)

Player of the Series: Usman Khawaja (Australia)

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The specs: 2017 Maserati Quattroporte

Price, base / as tested Dh389,000 / Dh559,000

Engine 3.0L twin-turbo V8

Transmission Eight-speed automatic

Power 530hp @ 6,800rpm

Torque 650Nm @ 2,000 rpm

Fuel economy, combined 10.7L / 100km

The specs

  Engine: 2-litre or 3-litre 4Motion all-wheel-drive Power: 250Nm (2-litre); 340 (3-litre) Torque: 450Nm Transmission: 8-speed automatic Starting price: From Dh212,000 On sale: Now

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software
Publisher:  Activision
Console: PlayStation 4 & 5, Windows, Xbox One & Series X/S
Rating: 3.5/5

THURSDAY FIXTURES

4.15pm: Italy v Spain (Group A)
5.30pm: Egypt v Mexico (Group B)
6.45pm: UAE v Japan (Group A)
8pm: Iran v Russia (Group B)

Ronaldo's record at Man Utd

Seasons 2003/04 - 2008/09

Appearances 230

Goals 115


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