Based on the three brilliant novels authored by the Chinese human rights activist, Ma Jian, Chris Patten concludes that China’s progress and prosperity in recent decades have been built on a “foundation of repression and the corpses of his fellow citizens.” Millions were killed, tortured and persecuted. But in China, Mao’s catastrophic era and the brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen protests had been glossed over – places were renamed, buildings demolished to erase memory. Today many young Chinese do not have the faintest idea of some dark chapters of their history.

The author says, despite this “repressed memory” and the massive purge of critics and dissidents, China will soon be the world’s largest economy, “as it was for 18 of the last 20 centuries.” The novelist, Ma “does not want to see China fail, and no one else should, either. A weak China would not be in the interest of its citizens or the rest of the world.” So he relies on “literary efforts” – Beijing Coma, 2009; The Dark Road, 2014; and China Dream, 2018 – to “revive China’s collective memory and restore its sense of public morality and civic responsibility.”

In his novel, Beijing Coma, Ma captures the horrors that occurred in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. A year earlier, the Democracy Wall Movement began. Mao died in 1978 and people were eager for change. The protagonist, Dai Wei, a student was shot in the head by the army. Lying in a coma he was conscious yet unable to communicate and could only absorb the world around him by listening to conversations between his mother and visitors to the flat. Whilst motionless in his bed, cut off from everyone, with only his memories keeping him company, his past came back to haunt him. The novel highlights a nation of amnesia sufferers, where remembering the country's troubled history had become a crime.

In The Dark Road, Meili, and her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, were on the run to escape the population control squad. As a descendant of Confucius, he was duty-bound to continue the male line. He had a daughter, and his wife was pregnant with a second child. He decided to outrun the law until his heir was born. The family travelled the rivers, earning a little money and investing in a rickety boat to carry them to the next settlement.

Officials in rural China enforce the central government’s one-child policy with bloodthirsty fervour. They do not hesitate to invade a home, drag off a woman and tie her down to sterilise her, insert an IUD or inject her fetus with a toxic solution. Then the family must pay the bill, knowing the enforcers may well line their pockets. When the peasants cannot pay, their livestock and crops are confiscated. Not only do they lose their livelihoods, their houses are often bulldozed into piles of bricks and dust.

In seven dream-like episodes, Ma charts the psychological disintegration of a Chinese provincial leader who was haunted by nightmares of his violent past. Ma takes aim at Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’ propaganda, creating an acerbic satire of totalitarianism that reveals what happens to a nation when it is blinded by materialism and governed by violence and lies. Blending tragic and absurd reality with myth and fantasy, this dystopian novel is a portrait not of an imagined future, but of China today.

Ma warns against an "increasingly harsh" political climate in China, that has echoes of the Cultural Revolution, after authorities barred him from entering the mainland. His novels “pose legitimate, critical questions about China’s rise after a century of humiliation, invasion, and civil war.” Yet it is paying an extremely high price for its ascent. The question is whether “a political model that criminalizes the yearning for justice, accountability, knowledge, and free speech” can really “constitute a sustainable way to govern a great country?”

The author is right about “repressed history, like repressed memory” – however effective – “creeping back to the surface one way or another.” Ma serves as a custodian of China’s modern history, and his works may one day help his country come to terms with its violent past. Without such an effort, every anniversary of Tiananmen massacre is a painful reminder of a shameful chapter in history.