Olivia: Most people think of China's economic miracle as a story of top-down planning and control. But what if the real engine is a chaotic, morally gray world of con artists, counterfeiters, and grassroots hustlers? A world where fraud is a national pastime. Jackson: That sounds a lot more interesting than the official version. It’s like finding out the pristine, polished skyscraper is actually powered by a bunch of guys in the basement hot-wiring the grid with duct tape and sheer audacity. Olivia: That is the perfect analogy. And that chaotic energy is exactly what we're diving into today with Yu Hua's incredible book, China in Ten Words. Jackson: And Yu Hua is the perfect guide for this. He's not some distant academic; he started his career as a dentist during the Mao era, literally pulling teeth in a small town. He's seen the absurdity and the pain up close. Olivia: Exactly. And that personal experience is what makes this book so powerful and why it's actually banned in mainland China. He uses ten simple words to unlock the country's most complex, hidden stories. Jackson: Banned is always a good sign. It means someone's telling a truth that makes people uncomfortable. Olivia: And to understand that uncomfortable truth, you have to go back to where Yu Hua's own story begins—in the bizarre world of the Cultural Revolution, where even the simple act of reading was a high-stakes adventure.

Olivia: During the Cultural Revolution, most books were destroyed or banned as "poisonous weeds." The only things available were political texts. But as a teenager, Yu Hua and his friends got their hands on these forbidden novels, which were often in terrible shape. Jackson: What do you mean, in bad shape? Like, just old and falling apart? Olivia: Worse. They were literally torn apart. He calls them "headless, tailless novels." The beginning and ending pages were often ripped out because that's where the author's name and publisher were. So you'd get a story that starts in the middle of a dramatic scene and ends just before the climax. Jackson: That sounds incredibly frustrating. How does reading a broken story help you become a writer? I feel like it would just teach you bad habits, like never learning how to write a proper ending. Olivia: That’s the counter-intuitive genius of it. Yu Hua says it was the best literary training he could have possibly received. Because he was so desperate to know what happened, he and his friends would sit around and invent the endings themselves. They’d debate different possibilities, craft their own conclusions, and essentially become co-authors of the story. Jackson: Wow. So the state's attempt to completely control literature accidentally created a generation of wildly imaginative storytellers. That's a wild paradox. Olivia: It's a perfect metaphor for his entire experience. The scarcity forced creativity. He tells another story about wanting to read La Dame aux Camélias, the French novel. He and a friend got a hand-copied manuscript but could only borrow it for one night. Jackson: Oh no. What did they do? Olivia: They decided to copy the entire thing by hand themselves. They stayed up all night in an empty classroom, taking turns writing until their hands were cramping and their handwriting became an illegible scrawl. The next day, they had their own copy, but they had to sit together to decipher each other's terrible penmanship. The act of reading became a collaborative, painstaking reconstruction. Jackson: That’s dedication. It makes the act of reading so precious. Today we can download a thousand books in a second and feel nothing. They had to literally bleed for one story. Olivia: And that experience of creation from scarcity and absurdity deeply shaped his writing. His early work was part of China's avant-garde movement and was known for being quite graphic and violent. He grew up watching public executions. He even talks about napping on the cool slabs of the hospital morgue in the summer to escape the heat. That raw, unfiltered experience of life and death is all over his early fiction. Jackson: It makes sense. You can't write polite, tidy stories when your reality is anything but. The broken novels, the hand-copied manuscripts... it's all about piecing together a coherent world from violent, fragmented parts. That’s not just a literary technique; that was his life. Olivia: Exactly. And that theme—of a collective ideal being shattered into a million individual, often contradictory, pieces—is something he explores with his next word.

Olivia: That word is "People." Today, it might sound generic, but in Mao's China, "the people" was a sacred, almost religious concept. It was everything. Yu Hua says as a child, he had a profound realization he was very proud of. Jackson: What was it? Olivia: He concluded that "The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people." To him, they were one and the same—a single, monolithic entity of absolute power and goodness. It was a perfect piece of childhood logic, born from propaganda. Jackson: Right, it's a political abstraction. It’s a slogan. But did it ever become something real for him, something he could feel? Olivia: It did, once, in the most powerful way imaginable. It was in late May of 1989, during the Tiananmen Square protests. Martial law had been declared. He was a student in Beijing, and one night he was cycling back from the square, feeling cold, dejected, and hopeless. Jackson: I can only imagine the tension in the city at that moment. Olivia: He said the air was freezing. But as he got closer to an intersection called Hujialou, he suddenly felt a wave of warm air wash over him. He looked up and saw a massive, dense crowd of ordinary citizens—old men, young women, workers—standing shoulder to shoulder, forming a human wall to block the army convoys from reaching the square. They were singing the national anthem. Jackson: Wow. Olivia: He said the heat was radiating from their bodies, this collective human warmth pushing back the cold night. And in that moment, he understood. He wrote, and this is a quote that gives me chills, "the people is not an empty phrase, because I have seen it in the flesh, its heart thumping." Jackson: That's an incredible image. The physical warmth of a collective. It’s the opposite of an abstract slogan; it’s a biological fact. So what happened to that feeling? Where did that unified, warm body of "the people" go? Olivia: It vanished. After the crackdown on June 4th, that collective political spirit was crushed. The government pivoted. The new, unwritten social contract became: "Don't ask for political freedom, and we will let you get rich." The focus shifted entirely to economic development. Jackson: And the word "People" was replaced by another word from the book: "Disparity." Olivia: Precisely. The collective "we" fractured into a society of "haves" and "have-nots." Yu Hua tells these absolutely heartbreaking stories from modern China that illustrate this. There's one about an unemployed couple whose young son sees a banana at a fruit stall and asks for one. They can't afford it. The argument and the shame become so overwhelming that the father throws himself off their balcony, and the mother, in her despair, hangs herself. All over a banana. Jackson: That's devastating. It's the human cost of disparity, boiled down to the smallest, most tragic detail. From the warmth of a unified crowd to the cold isolation of a family that can't afford a piece of fruit. Olivia: It's a journey from one extreme to another. And that new, chaotic, money-driven China gave rise to a whole new vocabulary of survival and success.

Olivia: Which brings us to his most provocative and contemporary words: "Copycat," "Bamboozle," and "Grassroots." This is where you see the wild, unregulated energy of modern China. Jackson: This is the part that sounds like the Wild West. Give me an example. What does "copycat" really mean in China? It's more than just knock-off designer bags, right? Olivia: Oh, it's so much more. The Chinese term is shanzhai, which originally meant a mountain bandit stronghold. So it has this built-in spirit of rebellion and operating outside the law. It's a form of grassroots defiance. And it goes into the most surreal places. Jackson: I'm ready. Hit me with the surrealism. Olivia: Okay. In a southern city, a highly successful sex business was struggling with morale and quality control. So the boss implemented a new management strategy. He set up a "copycat" Communist Party Committee. Jackson: Hold on. You're telling me a brothel had a Party Committee? That's... that's performance art. Olivia: It gets better. The experienced prostitutes were the "Party Branch," and the new recruits were the "Youth League Branch." They held regular "organizational life" meetings where they engaged in "criticism and self-criticism" to improve their techniques and "maximize their assets." And it worked! The business was praised for its first-class service. Jackson: That is both absurd and... weirdly logical. It's using the master's tools to build a completely different, and illegal, house. It's the ultimate subversion. Olivia: It's taking the language of political control and applying it to the free market in its rawest form. This spirit connects directly to the next word, "Bamboozle," or huyou. It's the art of the con, and it's been elevated to a national pastime, thanks in large part to a famous comedian named Zhao Benshan. Jackson: So one guy made fraud popular? Olivia: He performed a skit on the national New Year's Gala, watched by hundreds of millions, where he "bamboozles" a perfectly healthy man into believing he's lame and needs to buy his crutches. It was a masterclass in psychological manipulation, and the term huyou exploded into the national consciousness. It's not just about lying; it's about creative, audacious deception. Jackson: Like the story about Bill Gates's apartment? Olivia: Exactly. A property developer created a fake news story that Bill Gates had rented their most expensive penthouse for the Beijing Olympics. It was a complete fabrication, but it generated massive hype. When they were called out, they didn't apologize. Everyone just called it "the supreme bamboozle of 2008." It was almost a mark of respect for their audacity. Jackson: So it's a culture where the line between marketing, fraud, and creative genius is incredibly blurry. And this is all driven by the "Grassroots"? Olivia: Yes. These are the people from the bottom, the "barefoot who do not fear the shod," as the saying goes. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They are the blood chiefs, the garbage kings, the peasants who become millionaires overnight. They are the engine of this chaotic growth. But it's a dangerous game. Yu Hua notes that the list of China's richest people often reads like a most-wanted list, because many of these grassroots tycoons end up arrested.

Jackson: So when you put it all together—the forced creativity from the Cultural Revolution, the lost collective dream of "the people," the rise of the hustler in this "copycat" and "bamboozle" culture—what's the big picture Yu Hua is painting of China today? Olivia: He's showing us a society in a state of profound moral confusion. The old ideological values of Maoism are gone, but the new values are almost purely about money and power, with very few ethical guardrails. This has unleashed this incredible, chaotic, and sometimes dangerous creativity. He quotes the ancient philosopher Mencius, who said, "We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort." Jackson: And China is definitely surviving in adversity. The question is, what kind of society is being built in the process? Olivia: That's the question he leaves us with. The ten words are not an answer; they are a diagnosis. They reveal the tensions, the wounds, and the fierce, unruly heartbeat of a nation that has lived through a century of trauma and transformation at warp speed. Jackson: It's a powerful framework. It makes you wonder what ten words you'd use to describe our own society right now. What are the words that secretly define us? We'd love to hear what words you all would choose. Drop us a comment on our socials and let's talk about it. Olivia: A fantastic question to reflect on. It shows how a book about one country can become a mirror for all of us. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.