内容简介
Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, and thesubject of a bitter lawsuit between author and publisher, Dream ofDing Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's most important novelto date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeplymoving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling scandalin contemporary China. As the book opens, the town directors,looking for a way to lift their village from poverty, decide toopen a dozen blood-plasma collection stations, with the hope ofdraining the townspeople of their blood and selling it to villagesnear and far. Although the citizens prosper in the short run, therampant blood-selling leads to an outbreak of AIDS and huge loss oflife. Narrated by the dead grandson of the village head and writtenin finely crafted, affecting prose, the novel presents a powerfulabsurdist allegory of the moral vacuum at the heart ofcommunist-capitalist China as it traces the life and death of anentire community. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal ineastern China, Dream of Ding Village is the result of three yearsof undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to awell-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a smallvillage decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated bloodselling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility takenor reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family,destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as heexploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. Theresult is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at whichChina is developing—and what happens to those who get in theway.