There, more violence ensued-in which Teng’s hand was injured, his tie was violently yanked off, his legs were kicked, and he was sworn at-while he vainly quoted his citizen’s constitutional rights. “Why waste words on this sort of person?” one police officer asked in front of him. “Let’s beat him to death, dig a hole to bury him in, and be done with it.” Eventually they let him go but only, Teng suspected, because they were a little intimidated by his academic status and, more importantly perhaps, because a timely tweet-before the police tried to remove his mobile phone-had gathered some of his supporters outside the police station. Teng was lucky: one of his peers, the lawyer Gao Zhisheng, has been imprisoned for years, multiply beaten, burnt with cigarettes, and tortured with electric shocks on account of his advocacy on behalf of groups persecuted by the regime; another human rights advocate, Ni Yulan, has been crippled by her police interrogators and is currently under house arrest in a Beijing hotel lacking electricity and running water.

A short walk from Zhongguancun’s glass and neon palaces, another face of the contemporary Chinese miracle was showing itself. Welcome to the world of The Fat Years.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years describes a near-future world that, to a significant degree, already exists. This is a China in which a dictatorial Communist Party has guided the country safely through a global economic meltdown that has weakened the liberal democratic West but strengthened the appeal and prestige of an authoritarian Chinese model, enabling China to reassert its premodern status as the economic, political, and cultural center of the world. This is a China in which the majority of the urban population-despite the Party’s repressiveness and corruption, and ruthless censoring of history and the media-seem happy enough with a status quo that has delivered economic choice without political liberties; in which many once-critical voices have been marginalized or co-opted.