Beijing Coma [Hardcover]

Beijing Coma is both enthralling and tremendously moving. Beautifully and lucidly written, it manages to combine the panoramic sweep of the Beijing student movement with an intensely personal view of the minutiae of the events of 1989. Although the book bears the usual disclaimers - any resemblance with persons living or dead is purely coincidental, etc, I loved how so many of the main players are perfectly recognisable, so that fictional Ke Xi is so obviously student leader Wu'er Kaixi and Bai Ling is clearly Tiananmen student commander-in-Chief Chai Ling (although Chai Ling was not run over by a tank), and so on. Other students are amalgams of real life individuals, but many are still identifiable.

The events themselves are detailed and historically accurate. While capturing all the headiness of the student movement as it grew, the book reveals more than the newspaper reports at the time ever did about the squabbles and infighting among students, right up to the night of the army's final onslaught on the square and the horrors that ensued.

But Gripping as it is, this is not just a novel about the student movement and the 1989 massacre, it is also about the massive changes in Beijing, including the lives of many of the students after Tiananmen. Most touching of all, it is the story of the protagonist's mother, whose predicament is so vividly threaded through the narrative. She is buffeted by so many political pendulum swings, yet deep down continues to believe in Communism. Only after Tiananmen are her beliefs shattered. She is the Chinese Everywoman of the 1990s and 2000s, like so many of her generation, unable to benefit from the Chinese economic miracle around her. Instead, her life is dedicated to tending her comatose student son till finally she loses her mind while her old apartment is being cleared to make way for new (and corrupt) property developments in advance of the Beijing Olympics.
This is not just the ultimate Tiananmen novel, well worth the 20 year wait, it is THE Beijing novel of the post-Wild Swans era. An unforgettable book.

This book provided me with a wealth of knowledge about the experiences of students in Tianamen Square in 1989. I feel enlightened for reading it. I felt for the characters and was moved by Ma Jian's writing. It is very long and not always gripping, however, particularly at the beginning. I am glad that I ploughed through and would encourage everyone to do the same.

Every now and again a book comes along that defines the spirit of a great moment in history: All Quiet on the Western Front, Doctor Zhivago, maybe Red Star over China. But until now there has apparently been nothing that encapsulates the idealism, chaos and horror of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and massacre. Beijing Coma may well be the epic novel that China-watchers have been waiting for.

Just like Doctor Zhivago, Beijing Coma is too close to the bone for the Communist censors and will remain banned for many years in the author's home country. But no matter - the genie is out of the bottle. China's porous borders, vast diaspora and insatiable appetite for self-examination will ensure that Ma Jian's book will slowly seep into China's consciousness, reminding readers of the cracks in the system that the Communist leadership can only camouflage with economic miracles and Olympic fanfare - Beijing's bread and circuses.

On the face of it, Beijing Coma might seem a depressing read. The story of doomed youth is told through the memories of comatose narrator Dai Wei, who lies immobile but conscious, having been felled by a policeman's bullet during the crackdown. But the narrative is anything but stagnant, as it chops rapidly between the doomed student protests and the conversations Dai Wei overhears over the years lying in his mother's apartment, as he waits for his brain to die or his body to move. The pacy dual narrative structure weaves pre- and post-Tiananmen events together as we hurtle towards the fateful conclusion.

Although most readers will surely know the student protests ended in a bloodbath, Ma Jian drip-feeds clues about the fate of each character until the very end, and Dai Wei's slightly delirious musings about his past and the fragments of overheard conversation add a second and third dimension to the politics of the protests.

Ma Jian's depictions of the student movement and the coma are authentic. He witnessed the demonstrations at first hand, although he was apparently called away to hospital (to tend to his own comatose brother, who was hurt in an accident) before the crackdown was launched. He describes the coma intimately and sensitively but unsentimentally, and he is an equally uncompromising chronicler of the student movement. Although this book has been banned by the authorities, some of the veterans of the protest will surely feel stung by his frank portrayal. "We're trapped between irrational politicans and irrational students," one of the student leaders says at one point. It's hard to disagree.

Anyone who has witnessed student politics and studied political revolutions will find Beijing Coma offers a fascinating window on the subtle transmutation of one into the other. The narrator is a tough kid, honest and unpretentious, who runs security for the student movement, which affords him a ringside view of the protests, hunger stike, leadership and massacre.

The students start off boisterous, become rebellious, then evolve through radical, activist, bureaucratic, factional, polemic, anarchic and finally chaotic. In the end I admired their youthful idealism and courage but could find no sympathy for their selfishness, hypocrisy and infighting. Groups and individuals lurch from self-sacrifice to egotism, from pacifism to militancy, and proclaim themselves to be in charge without any apparent sense of irony.

Although this is fiction, it has a solid grounding in fact. In one true incident that crops up in the book, three men throw paint-filled eggs at the huge portrait of Mao on Tiananmen gate. The students hand the men over to the police, condemning them to more than a decade in jail. This astonishing act, clearly a breath-taking betrayal of fellow-dissidents, is justified by the students as protecting the movement against agents-provocateurs.

The memories, sounds and smells that colour Dai Wei's coma add a lucid foil to events on Tiananmen Square. Our eavesdropping on his mother's life, as she busies herself around him and welcomes friends and relatives, provides a gossipy soap opera that lightens the mood. A few of Dai Wei's fellow students come to visit, gradually filling in events after the massacre. We find ourselves on a voyage through post-Tiananmen China, caught up in the proscribed Falun Gong movement and steam-rollered by preparations for the Olympics.

Dai Wei's fragmentary recollections of life before the protests slowly reconstruct the personal and political backdrop to the events on the square. He tenderly remembers the four girls he loved, and one he admired from afar, and each of them return to haunt the final act. And even earlier memories uncover the terrible history punishment meted out to "rightists" such as his father.

All this amounts to a tragic history of modern Chinese dissent, which would have been an achievement for any author. By telescoping the picture through Dai Wei's comatose mind's eye, Ma Jian has written an outrageous, bold, damning classic.