Jonathan Mirsky
A Decade in the Grasslands
Wolf Totem
By Jiang Rong
(Translated by Howard Goldblatt)
(Hamish Hamilton 526pp £17.99)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

Wolf Totem is the best Chinese book I've read for many years and the only really good novel. It is enlightening, poignant, mysterious - and a miracle.

It is a miracle because it is an onslaught - as the author has stated elsewhere in so many words - on Chinese culture, more particularly in its modern form: 'sheep-like', materialistic, insensitive, ecologically stupid, ignorant, and chauvinist. How Wolf Totem was permitted publication by the official censors, and how Jiang Rong remains at large, beats me. I'm not surprised, however, that Wolf Totem has sold many thousands of copies in China: readers there are just as eager for good literature as anywhere else and like all subjects of authoritarian regimes they search for anything that lifts the curtain hiding the realities.

Jiang Rong (apparently a nom de plume) gives us a profound look into a 'barbarian' culture. That is what the Chinese have, for centuries, called non-Han (that is, non-ethnic Chinese) 'minority peoples', whom the Hans, throughout their rule over China and its non-Han regions, have admired, scorned, misunderstood and violated.

Jiang Rong spent more than a decade in the grasslands, and took many years setting down what he saw and learned during that time in Wolf Totem. It is excellently translated and introduced by Howard Goldblatt.

Here is the story. During the Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, two 'educated youths' from Beijing, Chen and Yang, members of the social class most persecuted by Mao's fanatics, volunteer to live on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. For eleven years they adapt themselves to a wholly un-Han, indeed anti-Han, culture. The herdsmen, manoeuvring themselves within the fragile balance of the grasslands, admire, fear and worship the wolf, an animal that Hans not only fear but loathe above all others. Chen and Yang fall under the spell of the grasslands, including the spirituality of the herdsmen whose 'feudal' beliefs are proscribed by the Party.

The balance of man and wolf works like this. Everything depends on the grass feeding the sheep, horses and goats, which the herdsmen use for food, clothing and shelter. The grasslands are also home to marmots, mice, rabbits and gazelles that, if left alone, devour the grass and destroy the herdsmen's lives. Wolves maintain a balance by eating these grass-guzzlers. A Mongol explains to a wolf-hating official: 'If there were no wolves, squirrels and rabbits alone would lay waste to the grassland within a few years. Wolves are their natural enemy; they keep them in check.' The wolves also prey on the sheep, goats and horses, however, which need protection - yet here, too, there is a delicate balance: by attacking the horses the wolves destroy the weakest ones, ensuring that the surviving ponies become hardy and agile.

The Mongols, and soon Chen and Yang, believed that it was those sorts of horses, the survivors of generations of wolf-attacks, that carried the cavalry of Genghis Khan and later the Manchus when they overran and conquered the Chinese. But above all it was the qualities of the wolves - tactical, strategic, imaginative, flexible and merciless - that the observant warriors of the grasslands adopted to achieve their conquests. Chen, who has learned most about wolves through his attempts to raise a captured cub, realises that 'the purpose of the wolves' existence ... was their sacred, inviolable freedom, their independence, and their dignity'.

The Mongols and Hans rise convincingly from Jiang's narrative in ways that anyone who has ever encountered Hans in Mongolia, Xinjiang or Tibet will recognise. The Hans, the new ruling class, are trigger happy - ready to use automatic weapons on any creature they eat (wolves, swans, marmots are all targets) - and scornfully, insensitively transform the grasslands into pasture, which inevitably turns into the desert that now rolls yellow sandy clouds over Beijing, where this summer they will choke Olympic sportsmen and women.

A Han marmot-killer tells Chen, who is watching in agony the destruction of the culture he has grown into: 'What do we care about next year? We go where there's food and never worry about the year after that.' But killing the marmots for food is not the ultimate reason. Wolves feed on marmots. 'We were sent here by Chief of Staff Sun, who said that marmots not only destroy the grassland [which they don't do if kept down by wolves] but also serve as the main source of food for the wolves before winter sets in. So marmots are included in our wolf-extermination campaign.'

Twenty years after leaving the grasslands, Chen/Jiang, now a middle-aged, highly qualified academic, returns for a visit. He is writing Wolf Totem. He sees young Mongols racing across the steppes on their motorcycles and shooting anything in sight. The Mongols' yurts - felt tents - have been replaced by brick houses with televisions broadcasting Animal Planet. Chen remarks, 'We've witnessed the "impressive" victory of an agrarian society over a nomadic herding society. Current government policy has developed to the stage of "one country, two systems", but deeply rooted in the Han consciousness is still "many areas, one system".' That's pretty subversive. But here comes the blow to the Party's guts: 'Since China doesn't have a competitive, scientific, and democratic system for selecting top talent, honest and frank people are denied a chance to rise up.'

This magnificent book is not a tiresome polemic. Jiang pulls off the difficult trick of writing convincingly about spirituality and nature. An elderly herdsman explains how wolves run down gazelles: they prey on those careless gazelles that wait until daylight to urinate. If they try to run then, they suffer cramp. 'You see, a gazelle can run like the wind, but not all the time, and wise old wolves know that's when they can bring one down alone. Only the cleverest gazelles are wise enough to forsake the warmth of sleep to get up to relieve themselves at night. They never have to worry about a wolf running them down.'

Decades after his years with the herdsmen, Chen looks out of his window. 'A yellow-dragon sandstorm rose up outside his window, blocking the sky and the sun. All of Beijing was shrouded in the fine, suffocating dust. China's imperial city was turned into a hazy city of yellow sand ... The wolves had receded into legend, and the grassland was a distant memory.'

In a recent interview in The Bookseller Jiang Rong said that the Hans are still sheep-like: 'the real meaning of the book is to criticise the Chinese mentality'. Not wholly sheep-like, though: out on the grasslands, when Chen/Jiang returned there after many years, the Chinese were slaughtering wolves by blowing their heads off with explosives.

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist specialising in Chinese matters.