Words matter. These are the best Ma Jian Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Living in London is like being on a luxury cruise liner.
My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime’s strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.
When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.
In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.
I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.
Whatever China I’d been born into, I would probably still have become a painter – I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn’t been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.
I am completely in favour of dialogue and engagement. But it must be a true, open dialogue.
I believe that the Tibetans should have the right to control their own destinies and decide for themselves whether they want to be part of China or not. But this view isn’t shared by most Chinese, or even the leaders of most Western democracies. As long as the Communist Party is in power, there is little hope for Tibet.
It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.
I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.
The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden.
‘Three Kingdoms’ gives you a panoply of different routes; everyone can find their own path. It shows that sometimes the route to fulfilment or success is not the obvious one. You must take twists and turns to achieve a goal.
When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation’s only physical link to the past.
Red Dust was about the late 1980s; it was a time of burgeoning hopes and opening up and people searching for new ways.
In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.
China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.
The Beijing Olympics represent China’s grand entrance onto the world stage and confirmation of its new superpower status.
I left Beijing in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because, having been blacklisted by the government, I couldn’t publish my works on the mainland.
If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.
Only when you are aware of the uniqueness of everyone’s individual body will you begin to have a sense of your own self-worth.
I am a writer. Being critical is a writer’s responsibility.
