ON FEBRUARY 19th cinemas in China will begin showing “Wolf Totem”, a film based on a Chinese novel critiquing man’s impulse to tame nature, in which a young man from Beijing attempts to domesticate a wolf. The release itself marks a change in the natural order of things: for the author of the novel, the director of the film and the state system that produced it.
The author, Lu Jiamin, was jailed for more than a year for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Worried his subsequent writings would be banned, he wrote the novel under a pen name, Jiang Rong. The French director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, had been banned from China for making “Seven Years in Tibet”, a film released in 1997 that depicts the Chinese army invading Tibet and portrays the Dalai Lama sympathetically. But China Film Group, a state-owned giant, and others made Mr Annaud a rare foreign director of a Chinese feature film, with a budget of more than $40m.
The Communist Party has sensible reasons to embrace both men. The novel, Mr Lu’s first, is a literary phenomenon: it has sold more than 5m copies in China, in addition to many more pirated ones. In 2007 an English-language translation won the inaugural Man Asia Literary Prize. The acclaim was so great, and so swift to spread, that back-footed censors decided to turn a blind eye to the author’s background and...Continue reading
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