It's the year 2013 and China is stronger and richer than ever before, while the rest of the world is still reeling from a huge economic tsunami that struck a year earlier. Starbucks is now owned by the Wang Wang Group, and the hottest new drink around the world is longan dragon well tea latte.
The authoritarian, and often ruthless, Communist Party faces no serious opposition and is patting itself on the back for not following the path of the West. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics is thriving and foreigners who once lambasted China over human rights are now afraid to offend China. Most interesting, the majority of the Chinese people, at least the residents of major cities, are enjoying unprecedented fat times, and couldn't be happier.
This is China's future as described in The Golden Age, a new novel by Hong Kong writer Chan Koon-chung, who has lived on the mainland since 2000, spending the last nine years gathering string for this book.
The Chinese title, Shengshi Zhongguo 2013, which can be translated as a prosperous and grand period, has been used to describe the two apogees of imperial history, the Han and Tang dynasties. It's also a term that is appearing more and more frequently in the Chinese media today and which is becoming a daily part of conversations - as a giddy description of present-day China.
While the book was released in recent months in Hong Kong and Taiwan (it's too sensitive to be released on the mainland), it's creating an increasingly loud buzz among mainland intellectuals in China for it's realistic description of contemporary China and its veiled criticism of the growing number of Chinese who have either bought into the system or have been bought by it.
The story is told through the eyes of Lao Chen, a Taiwanese writer who has lived in Beijing for many years, and who shares the strange mass happiness that has smitten the majority of China's population. Or at least he seems quite complacent until he accidentally runs into two long-lost friends, Xiao Xi and Fang Caodi - the only discontented people he's encountered in a long while.
Xiao is a 1980s activist who is frustrated because her former intellectual friends have abandoned the fight against repression in exchange for more comfortable living. 'They've changed ...' she tells Lao when they meet. 'They've all become so satisfied.'