YAN LIANKE HAS been pushing the boundaries for years. His novel Shouhuo (Feeling Good) is a wickedly surreal tale of a provincial official who tries to promote tourism in his impoverished fiefdom by renting Lenin's corpse and organising a circus of deaf, dumb and blind people. By juxtaposing Lenin, an icon of communism, with crassly capitalist enterprise, Yan questions the twin values on the mainland today: rampant capitalism and politically repressive Leninism. Surprisingly, in February Shouhuo won the officially sanctioned Lao She Literary Award.
'This shows the tolerance of the award,' said a bemused Yan.
That official tolerance may be over. With his latest publication, Wei Renmin Fuwu (Serve the People), 47-year-old Yan has become the first author to have a book banned this year.
On the phone, Yan is courteous, but definite. 'I can't talk to you,' says the Beijing resident, in a deep voice overlaid with a strong Henan accent. 'I've been told not to. I have to think about my safety and the safety of my family.'
The hammer fell last month when the central government's Propaganda Department issued an edict against Serve the People on the eve of the National People's Congress (which has just ended), traditionally a time when censors grow anxious about perceived challenges to Communist Party rule.
The novella 'slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex', the edict said. 'Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from or report on it.' When Huacheng, a Guangzhou-based magazine, published the story in a shortened, 50,000-character version - which Yan says gutted the original 90,000-word work - the entire issue of the magazine was confiscated. Other magazines planning to publish the story by one of China's best-known writers - Yan has won about 20 awards - quickly pulled it. Contacted by telephone, editors at Huacheng declined to comment.