This unspoken consensus also demands public amnesia about communist-manufactured cataclysms: in particular, the man-made disasters of the Maoist era (the brutal excesses of Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution) and, of course, the bloodletting of 1989. “Many of those who were once critical of the regime are now part of the system,” Chan Koonchung has observed. “The Party has absorbed the elites by handing out funding, positions, and employment. Those in universities are getting government projects so they don’t want to be vocal. Many people depend on money from the state to build their careers. So the intellectual center is mainly employed by the state, which is now rich enough to attract it with apparently limitless funding. More and more people are buying into this now. It’s very difficult to find people to make a challenge” while critics of the government are becoming “increasingly marginalized.”

Although communist control might be far less visible in contemporary China than it was during, say, the Maoist era, it is quietly ubiquitous: through public and private businesses, local politics, media, and culture. The Party, Chan Koonchung points out, is “the elephant in the room of contemporary China-no one discusses it but it’s always there. The country’s like a Rubix cube-enormously complex, but with one organizing principle: the Communist Party.” When I met him in Beijing in the summer of 2010, he invited me to lunch at a fashionable East-West fusion restaurant in Sanlitun, one of the city’s best-heeled commercial quarters, littered with high-end bars, cafés, and designer stores, through which The Fat Years’ own hero, Chen, regularly strolls feeling “incomparably blessed.” After a smiling, smart-casual young Chinese waiter introduced himself to us in English (“Hi, I’m Darren, I’ll be looking after you today”) then disappeared again, Chan Koonchung conspiratorially reminded me: “There’ll be Party members in this joint venture too, keeping an eye on things.”