China's dissident authors losing their home appeal

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - You might have expected a throng of local fans when a well-regarded Chinese author spoke at a Shanghai literary festival in March, but Ma Jian's audience, like his readership, had only a handful of Chinese mainlanders.

China-born Ma, whose translator-wife and passport are both British, is barely known in his native land, and dissident voices like his are winning ever less sympathy from mainland readers.

"I hadn't heard of him before, and it was only when I read about him on the Internet that I realized he was famous. But he seems quite an angry man," said one Chinese literature graduate attending the festival, who declined to be identified.

Such ignorance does not surprise Ma.

"My books are still banned in China, but they're published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so that's where most of my Chinese readership is," he said.

Ma is best-known for "Red Dust," an autobiographical travelogue set in 1980s China which sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide in 12 languages. In it, Ma relates a number of awkward encounters with officials, though politics is not his main concern, he says.

"China's economy is booming, but politically very little has changed. No one is allowed to criticize the government and the media is very strictly controlled," said Ma.

The Chinese government previously stoked resentment for its heavy-handed censorship, but now a growing number of Chinese find politically concerned writers like Ma irrelevant, academics say.

"Several writers unpopular with the leadership left China post-1989 and the concerns of readers in China changed from the politics- and art-committed '80s to ... increasingly popular styles of fiction," said Julia Lovell, a Chinese literature research fellow at Cambridge University.

"The exiles are developing in a different direction, and the rise of a China-centered, anti-foreign nationalism on the mainland since the 1990s increases that distance," she said.

GAO WHO?

The fate of the only China-born Nobel literature laureate, Gao Xingjian, is a case in point.

Gao's most famous work is "Soul Mountain," an autobiographical part-Buddhist odyssey through China searching for his roots, but it was banned in China. He won the Nobel prize in 2000, but the Chinese government views French passport-holder Gao as no longer Chinese -- and many Chinese have never heard of him.

"Someone Chinese writing in English, like Ha Jin, doesn't care so much about reaching a Chinese audience," said a senior researcher in modern Chinese literature based in Hong Kong, speaking of the U.S.-resident, Pulitzer Prize winner Ha.

"But for those writing in Chinese, the question is simply how to reach that audience -- often all they can do is to get published in Hong Kong," said the researcher, who asked not to be named.

There is also the Internet which, though monitored, offers far better access to a mainland readership, for politically concerned writers, than Chinese publishers can dare to offer.

One writer whose work spread fast among China's netizens is Zhang Yihe, author of "The past is not like dissipating smoke," which recounts Mao Zedong's 1957 purge of intellectuals.

"It was restricted when it was actually published," said the researcher. "But by that point it could always find a way in."

TURNING THE PAGE

For all the continued political censorship, however, other formerly off-limits areas are beginning to open up and writers are quickly turning to address them.

"Since the phenomenon of the so-called 'Pretty Women' writers, it has been possible to write about sexually explicit aspects of pop culture, or about drugs culture, as Mian Mian does," said Lovell, referring to a Shanghai writer whose works have angered the censor.

This is part of the new commercialism that defines China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests, said Lovell, where publishing has become increasingly tied to China's market economy as publishers battle it out for readers.

Writers like Han Han and Guo Jingming, the 20-something pin-ups who found fame as teen-age authors writing online about their struggles and joys, generate millions of yuan in revenue for their publishers.

But if modern China's bookshelves stock plenty of Han Han and not much Ma Jian, China appears to now be quietly letting even a few politically sensitive, formerly blacklisted authors back onto the shelf, among them 1949-born poet Bei Dao.

"He was associated with the overseas exile movement and the anti-1989 protest, but his works seem to have made their way back into mainstream publishing," said Lovell.

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