When one looks at the career of a figure like Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party from the 1930s, then, in effect, despot for the new country he had been so instrumental in bringing into existence after 1949, one has to ask what sort of psychology he had. The testament of his doctor Li Zhisui showed a man who was lascivious, indifferent to regular sleeping habits, and sometimes heedless about his personal hygiene. He may have been an indifferent to callous husband – enduring the execution of one of his four wives, and the abandonment of another – but as a father he seemed kind and caring enough. In the early years too, he had the ability to be loyal to friends, though with time and greater power that faded fast. One thing that even the most cursory examination of his biography shows though is that this was a man who had been through more than enough to send him slightly insane. The violence, insecurity, and general chaos of his first half century on earth explained some of his paranoid and often cruel attitudes as he grew older. He did not come from an easy world, and unsurprisingly, did not end up as an easy person.

This is an extreme. But I was thinking about it as I read Jie Yang’s new, and very clear and concise, study,  Mental Health in China (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2018). In Mao’s China, as she alludes to a number of times, people we would now understand to be schizophrenic, bipolar, or depressed, were mostly labelled as deviants, and more often than not dealt with with great cruelty. The stigma of having a mental health problem is something Jie Yang gives plenty of evidence of in China today. I remember direct experience of it, when living in a medical college in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia in the mid 1990s next door to a young woman who had a series of physical and speech disabilities, and was largely confined to home. The way that people talked about her, even medical professionals at the time, was laden with a sort of prejudice and fear., Oh, they would say, you live next door to that girl.

Jie Yang’s book is rich in the modern terminology of mental illness in China. Most of these conditions can be explained easily enough by the rapid economic development of the country since 1978, and the social and cultural changes these have entailed. With almost daily physical and material transformations, is it any surprise that people have ended up disorientated?  Just as there is socialism, and capitalism, with Chinese characteristics, so there is a series of mental health issues with Chinese characteristics. Princess Syndrome (single female children of families spoilt to such a degree they demand multiple flats and other benefits before even considering marriage partners), `empty hearth syndrome’  (for cadres and others whose social usefulness means people only ever come to them with some practical design in mind rather than to know and understand them), and then very specific conditions like smog blues, unemployment syndrome, petitioning addiction, and the more easy to understand (but slightly dubious) internet addiction.

Mapping out these separate conditions gives a view of China that one doesn’t hear enough about. We are forever learning about economic and political and social conditions in China. But about the real toll that everlasting fast change and development has on the inner lives of the key actors involved – Chinese people – there has been precious little. The work at Harvard on Deep China from a few years back started to address this. Jie’s book continues it, and deserves to be read widely. Not the least of the reasons for this is the vignettes that are presented throughout the book of the suffering and trauma that so many suffer as a result of conditions that, at least in Europe and the US, are now understood better and have treatments available for.

Perhaps too we should accord China, and its leaders, a bit of mercy. From 1978, of course, the world has been assiduous in encouraging China to industrialise, and use capitalism. Half the deal was honest enough. This has made the country wealthier and more developed. But no ever did, or could, claim, that any of this would make Chinese people happier. And now they are learning, in a way just as hard and merciless as the rest of us, that being well off and living comfortable lives may make you live longer, and suffer less physical pain – but it surely doesn’t make you happier.

Reading Charles Dickens when travelling around contemporary China is always a disconcerting experience. Much of the coruscating disdain the great Victorian writer showed for the high levels of inequality and social injustice in the new society emerging at his time has resonance in a China undertaking its own breakneck modernisation. When Dickens writes of the degradation of the environment by polluting factories and the general chaotic progress of mechanisation and its disruptive impact on society it’s easy to lift ones eyes from the page and look at the smoggy air that frequently descends on Chinese cities, or the waves of garbage that cling to the surface of almost any water way in the country, and feel like one is back in his time.  Is the People’s Republic just going through the same turmoil the England of Dickens’ did, only on a vaster scale and more quickly? And if so, is there a writer of his stature who is giving the same testament to these issues that he so magnificently gave?

For sure, Chinese society now is simply brimming with topics and issues that a writer with even the most modestly fecund imagination might want to dwell on. But comparing something like one of Dicken’s most complex works,’Bleak House’ with anything produced by Mo Yan or a contemporary Chinese writer arouses, at least for me, a feeling of a story unfolding before our eyes with no one there quite up to adequately rendering it into the same cacophony of different voices and registers that Dickens managed. The   slip between Esther’s narrative and that of the narrator in  `Bleak House’ has proved contentious amongst critics. Even so, and even on that kind of very straightforward level, the one thing even the most inattentive reading of the book will bring out is a diversity of different voices, and different perspectives – a trade mark of the novelist’s work, but one which gives a novel like this from his maturity a complexity and depth which is unique.

Perhaps the one Chinese contemporary novelist who does strive to reach these standards is Yan Lianke. A recent New Yorker profile of him described his remarkable journey, from rural Hunan to Renmin University, Beijing. Yan’s sometimes almost hallucinatory style, according to many of his readers, captures something of the almost surreal, dreamlike quality of contemporary China. In that sense, like the best of Dickens’ work, it holds a mirror up to what it perceives.

Comparisons to Yan, however, also show a very obvious difference. Dickens was able, throughout his career, to write and publish freely, no matter how fierce his social criticism became. That gives his work not just its literary but its historic value. It does pay witness to both the moral and material impacts of fast, uneven, growth, on a society that had never undergone these things before. Not a single word of his work, as far as I know, was ever censored. And he died as a much feted and honoured citizen, even though one who had been deeply critical of the establishment of the time. Yan’s work, as the profile (available here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/yan-liankes-forbidden-satires-of-china) makes clear, has been unavailable domestically for the last decade or so in China. That means that unlike Dickens, who was able to enjoy a vast audience deeply informed and situated in the world he was writing about, Yan has been deprived of this. His main readership, it seems, is outside China, where the reasons for reading him and the causes for enjoyment of his literature are different.

That raises one clear question about contemporary Chinese fiction and how it can really respond to the extraordinary changes in Chinese society now. The Victorian era industrial and social revolution happened largely in a society where there were wide freedoms and censorship from social conservatism rather than any particular political reasons. Without that latitude Dickens’ great work would never have been written. The answer to the question of where the Dickens the great chronicler of contemporary China is is the somewhat sobering one that if they were there, it is unlikely they would be heard. And what a loss that is.