Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Below is an excerpt from Geremie R. Barmé's book In the Red, on contemporary Chinese culture.

The excerpt is from the chapter on Wang Shuo called ‘The Apotheosis of the Liumang’. With the subject matter concerning a "competition to prove national strength and restore wounded pride", the piece has particular relevance in the year of the Beijing Olympic Games.

For the annotated text, with full references, please refer to the book, available on Amazon.

This excerpt, along with Geremie R. Barmé's introduction, is printed here with permission from the author.

Today, Wang Shuo 王朔 is generally known for his canny media moves and less-than-inspiring new writings. Back in the 1980s, however, he was one of the masters of Chinese fiction and, by extension, social commentary. In late 1989, following the traumatic events of the spring-summer season in Beijing, Wang’s latest novel was serialised in the leading Nanjing literary journal Zhongshan. The Chinese title of the book reflected the author’s mordant wit, as well as his serious purpose. It was Qianwen bie ba wo dang ren 千万别把我当人, which roughly translates as Whatever You Do, Don't Treat Me Like a Human Being. Although available since 2003 in a rather clunky English translation published under the title Please Don’t Call Me Human, I still prefer to render the title as No Man’s Land.

No Man’s Land is Wang’s most political, and pointed, farce. Now, nearly twenty years after the novel’s appearance, it seems like an opportune moment to reconsider this long-forgotten example of the Chinese picaresque, a work of comic bravado that still has a certain resonance.

Wang Shou's Please don't call me Human. Available on Amazon

It is impossible to review all of the themes and ideas of such complex novel as No Man's Land in a short précis. First and foremost, the story should be seen in the light of broader contemporary cultural issues. In particular the novel was written against the backdrop of a continued debate concerning the Chinese ‘national character’ that, from the late 1980s, was a central feature of the ‘cultural fever’ that engulfed the reading public and informed discussions about the direction of the country's economic and political transformation….

No Man's Land was first mentioned as a novel within a story. In ‘An Attitude’ [一点正经没有] the narrator Fang Yan announces to a clutch of fawning foreigners that his next literary work would be called Whatever You Do, Don't Treat Me Like a Human Being. The explanation of the title that Fang Yan gives is that in the book "one person pleads with his fellow Chinese: whatever you do, don't treat me as a human being. If you treat me like a person [ie, a normal Chinese] it'll be the end of me and I'll share everyone else's faults. Then our nation's problems will never be solved." In a number of Wang's earlier stories there were hints that some characters feeling completely de-humanized, or they sense a need to undergo a complete transformation, but in No Man's Land self-destruction and reconstruction become a motivating force, a national imperative, one that is realized through a mordant and deeply unsettling tale.