China Dream. By Ma Jian. Translated by Flora Drew. Chatto & Windus; 192 pages; £12.99.

I N HIS PREFACE to this compact, savage satire, the exiled novelist Ma Jian condemns “the false utopias that have enslaved and infantilised China since 1949”. For Mr Ma, who left the mainland for Hong Kong in 1987 and afterwards settled in London, the latest cloud in “the fog of lies that shrouds my homeland” is the “Chinese Dream”—a vision of fulfilment promoted by President Xi Jinping. Mr Ma’s hand-grenade (or stink-bomb) of a book is bitter and farcical. In his story, a mayor lauds the Communist Party’s aim of “replacing personal dreams with the communal China Dream”. Good luck, Mr Ma implies, with that.

His clownish protagonist, the bureaucratic oaf Ma Daode, is a corrupt, greedy hack. He has undeservedly risen to take charge of the China Dream Bureau in the city of Ziyang. With his multiple mistresses and swanky apartment stuffed with extorted loot, Ma Daode is an avatar for the abuses inflicted by the self-proclaimed “ruling party of humanity” on the people of China. His idea of fun consists of a boozy evening at the Red Guard Nightclub, a Maoist-themed brothel, where hapless hostesses dressed in retro uniforms pay expensive attention to his “jade stalk”.

However, as he hatches plans for a futuristic implant to re-program brains with state-approved desires, memories ambush Ma Daode. “Visions of death and violence” from his militant youth, during the carnage of the Cultural Revolution, resurface in traumatic flashbacks. As long-buried grief weighs him down “like an overripe pear”, he remembers how he helped drive his parents to suicide. “Men and ghosts”, a traditional healer tells him, “are intricately entwined.” The memory-wiping tonic (or China Dream Soup) that Ma Daode tries to concoct will never wash away “the nightmares that plague our minds”.

Mr Ma’s critique of the totalitarian mindset recalls that of Soviet-era dissidents. For him, the might of the state rests on its erasure of history, private and public. His anti-hero tells pensioners at a mass golden-wedding festival that “the past must be buried before the future can be forged”. This novel suggests the contrary, in scenes of slapstick mockery punctuated by tragic and elegiac interludes. Coercive amnesia traps a person, or a society, in a cycle of neurotic repetition. What is repressed always returns. Ma Daode finds that “his memories are like footballs on a pond: the harder he pushes them down, the higher they bounce up again.”

The satirical buffoonery is garnished with both horror and tenderness. Flora Drew translates with a keen ear for switches of voice and tone. If “China Dream” is a slighter work than Mr Ma’s major novels—notably, “Beijing Coma” and “The Dark Road”—it shares their courage and outrage. As he takes an angry hatchet to one Chinese dream, he cherishes another: of a democratic nation with “minds and hearts unchained”.