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271 Germans and the Death-­ Throes of the Qing Mo Yan’s The Sandalwood Torture Yixu Lü Orientation In 2001, a century after the final suppression of the Boxer Uprising, MoYan, a writer of considerable standing in the People’s Republic and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, published a novel that has the German colonial presence in Shandong play a prominent role. The plot centers on the suppression of militant Boxers, who had attacked the German railway construction sites in the district of Gaomi, by the provincial governor Yuan Shikai in concert with German forces. Historical records show that German troops had been involved from March 1899 till late November 1900 in bloody clashes with both peasants and Boxers, occasioned by local resistance to the building of the railway from Qingdao to Jinan. The district of Gaomi, Mo Yan’s birthplace , was occupied by these German forces in late 1900. Yuan Shikai then forced the populace to pay compensation to the Germans in early 1901. A particularly bloody conflict on 1 November 1900, in which the Germans besieged and demolished the fortified town of Shawo, resulted in an estimated 450 civilian casualties.1 In an afterword to his The Sandalwood Torture, Mo Yan recalls a visit to his home village in Gaomi in 1986, ten years before he began work on the novel. Hearing a melody from a popular art form, the “cat opera,” reminds him of other such songs he had heard and sung in his youth, celebrating legendary and heroic local resistance to the German military in 1900, and this is offered by the author as the genesis of the novel he began to write in 1996.2 It thus promises to be a Chinese response to the impact of German colonialism on a place and people with whom the author openly and strongly identifies. Its apparent affinities to the “nativist” school in contemporary Chinese fiction, whose best-­ known representative, the older writer Jia Pingwa, is also acknowl- 272    German Colonialism Revisited edged in MoYan’s afterword, lead to the further question as to how the colonial era in China is presented to a readership facing the more urgent issues of globalization . A French translation, Le Supplice du santal, appeared in 2006, followed by a paperback edition in 2009. A German translation also appeared in 2009 to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair’s focus on China and was subsidized by the government of the People’s Republic. An English version followed in 2012.3 This raises the question, to which I shall return at the end of this analysis, of the extent to which Mo Yan’s novel adheres to or departs from an officially approved view of China’s more recent history. Wang Ning’s essay The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity places him in that group of “avant-­ gardist” writers who “are seeking to compromise with the current trend of commercialization and to find a comfortable intermediate zone between writing for literature and writing for the market.”4 The question of compromise in the political sphere as well arises with Mo Yan’s work more generally, since it has obviously provocative aspects but yet seems to set off no alarms with the censor and, indeed, can attract government subsidies to be translated. Reviewing a translation of short stories by MoYan written in the years 1985–­ 87, Kam Louie describes their usually violent contents as “blood-­thirsty” and “gut-­wrenching,” and concludes: “Personally, my stomach is not strong enough for me to say that I enjoy these stories, but they do represent a major trend in Chinese fiction of the 1980s.”5 Much the same comment might be made of the provocative subject-­ matter of large tracts of The Sandalwood Torture, but here the additional question arises of how the breaking of taboos relates to the treatment of China’s past as a colonized nation. Mo Yan’s earlier novels of the 1990s do combine an assault on the sensibilities of the average reader with an undercurrent of political commentary, and we must enquire of The Sandalwood Torture whether it also contains a subversive political sub-­ text. Thus The Republic of Wine, first published in Chinese in 1992 and in English in 2000, is a social satire that revels in the transgressive theme of cannibalism . This was followed in 1995 by Fengru feitun, with the English translation Big Breasts and Wide Hips appearing in 2005. Here the obsessive transgression that carries the plot...

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