(“China is so big,” he added as a provocative after-thought, “that naturally it would need three hundred years of colonization to become like Hong Kong.”) From the middecade onward, urban China was given pause, every year, by student protests-over the lack of government transparency; over the rising cost of food; over the rats in their dorms-culminating in the two-month occupation of Tiananmen Square from April to June 1989. The demonstrations’ bloody denouement was an international and domestic PR disaster for China’s communist government: while Western politicians and overseas Chinese called for economic and political sanctions, hundreds of thousands of sobbing Chinese people came out in protest in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Western cities, comparing the People’s Republic to Nazi Germany and spray-painting the national flag with swastikas.

Fast-forward to the present day, and China’s communist rulers have effectively neutralized many of their former opponents. “For years,” as one analyst has observed, “the Beijing regime has stayed in power using a basic bargain with its citizens-tolerate our authoritarian rule and we’ll make you rich.” Confounding Western prophets of communist apocalypse, China’s post-1989 leaders accelerated economic reforms, while backpedaling on political liberalization. In China 2011, as in The Fat Years, much of the urban population seems to have tacitly agreed to forget past political violence, and to concentrate on enjoying the fat times of the here-and-now. Not only sharp businessmen, but also many of China’s writers and thinkers have benefited, enjoying generous research grants, conference budgets, and travel opportunities, as long as they do not break taboos on open discussion of issues such as official abuse of power, the need for political reforms, human rights abuses against critics of the regime, ethnic tensions (especially in Xinjiang or Tibet), and widespread censorship.