"The Deeply Odd Lives of Chinese Bureaucrats"

From the Wall Street Journal's China RealTime Report blog:

Why make up stories when life is so ridiculous?

As a bureaucrat, author Wang Xiaofang says he came across a rogue’s gallery of real-life characters: a woman who had plastic surgery on her backside so she could sleep her way to the top; a flooded apartment filled with cash owned by a top bureaucrat; another official who consulted a feng shui master to build a bridge, only because he felt he was supposed to have a bridge in his life.

At the start of his writing career, Mr. Wang figured out that you can write about Chinese officialdom – as long as you make it fiction. He told a crowd at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival on Wednesday that he felt “lost” when he entered official circles and saw corruption and power struggles. He didn’t want to be “spiritually crippled,” he said.

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Wang’s former boss was sentenced to death for corruption. Ma Xiangdong, the deputy mayor of the northeast city of Shenyang, was convicted of accumulating 31.5 million yuan, or about $5 million, through bribes and embezzlement. Authorties rejected Mr. Ma’s appeal.

On the day after Mr. Ma’s execution in 2001, Mr. Wang saw a picture of his boss in the newspaper, “holding a cigarette in his hand, looking very desperate and confused.” Saddened, Mr. Wang sat down and wrote 10,000 words, the beginning of what would be his first novel, “The Mayor’s Secretary.”

The rules in China are “don’t follow the wrong person, don’t sleep with the wrong person, and don’t say the wrong words,” Mr. Wang said at the literary festival in Beijing.

“I’m a typical example of following the wrong person,” he said.

 It doesn’t seem to have hurt him. Today he is the author of a dozen books—all fiction—and the dean of what some call the literature of officialdom—novels that chronicle the inner workings of bureaucratic China....MORE