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His past self and present existence are as antagonistic to one another as fire and water.
Our job, in this Bureau, is to ensure that the China Dream enters the brain of every resident of Ziyang City. It seems clear to me that if the communal China Dream is to fully impregnate the mind, all private remembrances and dreams must first be washed away.
The following month, they turned on Ma Daode’s father, Ma Lei, hauled him up before a crowd and branded him an unreformed Rightist, a member of the ‘five black categories’ of people whom Mao considered enemies of the revolution.
His own son?
The document bans from television, print and online media any mention of universal values, civil society, civil rights or judicial independence. ‘And freedom of the press, of course,’ Chief Ding stresses, discreetly adjusting his black toupee. ‘These subversive, Western concepts are used by foreigners to undermine our socialist system. From now on, Document Nine will guide our management of the ideological realm.’ His eyes widening with fervour, he adds: ‘Tonight, each department must assign staff to eliminate these dangerous ideas from our websites.’
Director Ma thinks how, once his China Dream Device is manufactured, such meetings will become unnecessary: just one click of a button and government directives will be transferred wirelessly into the brains of every Party member in the country.
the China Dream is a declaration of war against the reactionary Western concept of constitutional democracy.’
‘From now on, every individual, irrespective of rank, must submit their dreams and nightmares to me for examination and approval. If they fail to comply, every dream they have ever had, and every dream they ever will have, will be deemed an illegal dream!’
‘When you are happy, know that happiness is fleeting; and when you are sad, know that sadness too will not last.’
A PEASANT WENT INTO TOWN TO BUY SOME CONDOMS, BUT WHEN HE GOT TO THE PHARMACY, HE FORGOT WHAT THEY WERE CALLED, SO HE SAID, ‘MISS, DO YOU HAVE ANY PLASTIC BAGS TO PUT PENISES IN?’
Fellow compatriots, I saw it all with my own eyes. I saw two kids from opposing factions both yell “Long Live Chairman Mao” before shooting each other in the head. We mustn’t repeat the tragedies of the past. More than three hundred Red Guards and rebel workers lie buried in the wild grove over there.’
Look what happened here today, Hu – it was just like the violent struggle when opposing factions tried to kill each other while both pledging undying allegiance to Chairman Mao!’
remember seeing villagers peeling the bark from trees and eating it to fend off starvation. And I remember seeing the mother of Tianmu, a little girl I used to walk to the village school with, sitting on her porch, stone dead, her hands still gripping an empty bowl. If my father hadn’t been called back to Ziyang to oversee research into protein-rich algae, I doubt our family would have survived.
Now that the years have caught up with him, he has resolved to have just twelve mistresses at any one time, and has even considered limiting himself to six, because making love every day takes its toll on his health.
It’s a report by the head of the Internet Monitoring Unit on the China Dream Bureau’s collaboration with Number 3 Jail. The Bureau pays the jail 300 yuan a month to ensure that a selected group of inmates regularly deletes any negative comments from the Bureau’s website and replaces them with positive ones. Last month, however, two of the inmates attached graphic photographs of crash victims, which they had uploaded from social media, to a short piece about a high-speed train disaster. To prevent such mistakes recurring, the report recommends that the Bureau employs one hundred administrators
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‘But if life becomes disconnected from the past, it loses all meaning: “History is the chicken soup of the soul”, after all.’
‘You think nothing of deleting other people’s dreams and memories. I’ve heard you’ve even considered deleting mine. But when it comes to erasing your own, you hesitate!
‘You did have a sister,’ Ma Daode replies, ‘but during the Great Famine, your mother was so hungry, she had no choice but to kill her and eat her.’ Ma Daode feels a surge of compassion as this long-buried memory returns to him. ‘Just bugger off, will you! I don’t have a mother or a sister, and you and your corrupt officials demolished Yaobang Village months ago to line your filthy pockets!’ ‘You did have a sister. Her name was Gao Tianmu. I swear on Chairman Mao.’ Ma Daode wants to make the gesture of an oath but can’t remember where to place his right hand. ‘Fuck you and fuck your China
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Wtf
‘Comrades-in-arms! With our blood and our lives we have established the glorious new era of the China Dream. Let us bid farewell to the past and sing in unison: “The Cultural Revolution is really good, really . . .” Forgive me, I mean: “The China Dream is really good, really good . .
But utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship.
it was the Chinese Communists in the 1950s who coined the term ‘brainwashing’ (‘xinao’).
Decades of indoctrination, propaganda, violence and untruths have left the Chinese people so numb and confused, they have lost the ability to tell fact from fiction.
The rabid consumerism encouraged in the last thirty years and which, along with inflated nationalism, lies at the heart of the China Dream is turning the Chinese into overgrown children who are fed, clothed and entertained, but have no right to remember the past or ask questions.
filled with absurdities, both real and invented. The China Dream Bureaus, Red Guard Nightclubs and mass wedding anniversary ceremonies for octogenarian couples, for example, really do exist in today’s China.
