Wolf at the door

Jiang Rong has finally discovered why his controversial multimillion-selling book - which takes swipes at totalitarian rule and pours scorn on many elements of Han Chinese culture - has never been banned.

The author has heard through the grapevine that the censorship apparatchiks liked Wolf Totem's vivid writing and subtly reasoned arguments so much that they categorised the book as good, the author as bad.

For a country that can officially classify Mao Zedong as 70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong, this compromise does have the ring of authenticity. Not that Jiang has cause to worry: it is too late to outlaw a novel that has sold about three million genuine copies on the mainland (and millions of fakes) and remained top of the best-seller charts for most of the past five years.

Wolf Totem has also been a major success in translation. While foreign readers may not fully appreciate all of the author's slyly worked criticisms of the Cultural Revolution madness in particular and Han Chinese arrogance in general, the power of the story, its strong characters and the atmospheric descriptions of nomadic life on the Inner Mongolian grasslands have helped it shift 70,000 hardback copies in English.

The story has an autobiographical core. The main character, Chen, is a Cultural Revolution-era student who is sent to the grasslands - as Jiang was - to help nomadic Mongolian peasants follow the correct revolutionary path. Instead of proselytising to the herders, Chen becomes charmed by their simple yet spiritual lifestyle and deep respect for nature, and is mesmerised by the intelligence, loyalty and family-orientated mores of the wolves.

The main thread does not seem controversial but Jiang consistently compares the pure and free lives the nomads and wolves lead with the sheep-like structure of Han Chinese society, before and during the Cultural Revolution. The much-vaunted civilisation is dismissed as an agrarian society with little independent thinking or respect for the environment.

Jiang considers himself an exception to the rule and he has the prison time to back it up. The author has been incarcerated twice, for taking part in the Democracy Wall movement and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and is still classified as an anti-revolutionary.