Reviewing Lao She's Cat Country (March 2023)

Cat Country by Lao She (the pen name for Shu Qingchun) was published in China in 1932 and is considered to be among the earliest examples of Chinese science fiction, although it is radically different from such contemporary Chinese science fiction masterpieces as Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. When reading Cat Country, Gulliver's Travel's immediately comes to mind. This shouldn't be surprising as Lao had taught at the University of London for six years and became familiar with English literature before returning to the maelstrom of political uncertainty in China in 1930. As a genre, dystopian (not utopian) satire would be the more appropriate classification for this novel. The fact that Lao sets the stage by having spaceship crash land on Mars is incidental to his having placed his protagonist (the lone survivor) in a Lilliputian world.

As a satire, there is much history that lies beneath the surface of an otherwise simple tale and figures symbolically in the narrative. Lao lived most of his life during China's Century of Humiliation which dates back to the opening of China to Western trade (most notably opium) in the mid-19th century and up to the end of the civil war in 1949 that brought Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to power over a re-united China. Lao, only an infant at the time, learned from his mother about the death of his father during the Boxer Rebellion in 1901. The anti-foreigner revolt was crushed by the combined armed forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance of Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, US, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Lao was a sympathizer with the May 4th Movement which sprung from the Versailles Treaty in which the Allied Europe awarded Germany's China territories to China's long-time rival, Japan—an ignominious result given that the Chinese had been allies. Although he was in England at the time, Lao was certainly knowledgeable about the civil war between the CCP and the KMT (Nationalist Kuomintang) which escalated in the late 1920s just ahead of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. This is the backstory to Lao's fierce criticism of the Chinese character, the weakness and duplicity of China's leaders, and the foreign exploitation of a weak and divided post-imperial China.

What is striking for the modern reader is how well the satire carries over to the China of the late 1950s and 1960s. Lao's indictments against an earlier China could easily apply to the years of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, so Cat Country is more than just a period piece. Although Lao had not been officially pilloried by the CCP, the Hundred Flowers Movement that induced intellectuals to write and speak openly quickly ended with purges, and in Lao's case none were more personal than the attack early in the Cultural Revolution by an inflamed horde of teenage girl Red Guards who beat him and other authors and shamed them publicly in what at the time were called 'struggle sessions.' It was the very next day following the Red Guard attack that Lao, according to the official version, committed suicide by drowning.

There is nothing attractive about the China allegorically represented by the Martian world, Cat Country, described in Lao's novel. The author relentlessly criticizes nearly every aspect of the China he returned to, from the character of the Chinese people to their leadership and institutional failures, and he does so with very little of the levity he was reputed to have demonstrated in some of his other literary writings as seen in the following

Everywhere one looked, one found suspicion, pettiness, selfishness and neglect. You couldn’t find an ounce of honesty, magnanimity, integrity or generosity in the entire society.

Before proceeding further into Lao's characterization of the Cat People, two other biographical details add some insight to the theme of the foreigner in the novel. Lao, born in Beijing, was of the Manchu minority who were far outnumbered by the predominately Han population. Although the Qing rulers were themselves of Manchu origin, Lao nevertheless was not mainstream Chinese. A second detail is that Lao converted to Christianity in the early 1920s despite the facts that his father had died fighting the foreigners and that during the Rebellion, Christian missionaries were also the foreign enemy. As Lao was an ethnic minority and committed to a foreign creed, whose objectives were to Westernize, modernize and spiritually improve the backwards nation of China, Lao was arguably well positioned to think of himself as different from and therefore less vulnerable to his own thoroughgoing critique of the Chinese people. These differences notwithstanding, Lao was still Chinese and as such he couldn't help but have felt the humiliation of being regarded as inferior to the "foreign devils" his mother spoke of when he was young. Remembering the stories of how his own father had been killed by the Western foreigners, it had to pain him to have the character Scorpion, the collaborator, excuse the protagonist, Mr. Earth, for unintentionally scaring two Cat People to death by matter-of-factly stating the obvious reality in Cat Country where

With you, a foreigner, it’s easier yet.... Kill anyone you please and no one will dare say anything. In any case, Cat Country law doesn’t apply to foreigners."

Unrelentingly, Lao portrayed the Cat People—stand-ins for the Chinese population—as greedy and opportunistic (e.g., stealing bricks from the Ambassador's wife's house which had just collapsed from the deluge of an epic rainstorm killing many inside), constantly fighting among themselves, unaccustomed to "helping in anything that might be beneficial to someone else, even if that help only cost them a few words," religious in their observance of social status and the social hierarchy, and in general, "a mass of people who are so docile, stupid, pitiful, poor, easily satisfied and even happy." This happiness was in large part attributable to the ubiquitous narcotic from the leaves of the prized reverie tree, a narcotic like opium and not unlike the soma in Huxley's Brave New World also published in 1932.

Nevertheless, later Lao's protagonist/astronaut/foreigner/narrator/ Mr. Earth says

Of course, having come from a peaceful and happy China, I was inclined towards optimism and somehow or other felt there was still some hope for Cat Country.

The irony here is about as humorous Lao gets, the author seemingly unable to subdue the anger, frustration, and anguish he felt when writing this book. Over the course of the story, his protagonist alternates between despair and hope for Cat Country ... with despair ultimately winning out, hence the dystopian nature of the satire.

Mr. Earth catalogues the institutional and leadership failures of Cat Country. At one point—actually, he does this at many points in the story—he sinks into hopelessness, declaring with dark humour that

Perhaps the god who had made the Cat People intended them as a joke. They had schools, but no education; politicians, but no government; people, but no personal integrity; faces, but no concept of face. One had to admit that their god had gone a little too far with his little joke.

As he relates the history of Cat Country to his Earth visitor, Young Scorpion (one of three guides—each named Scorpion and representing a different generation) illustrates their peculiar philosophy of education, whereby

[W]e decided on a thoroughgoing innovation: anyone who went to school would be counted as a university graduate on the first day of classes. Actually, this was the best of all possible systems for Cat Country. You see, statistically we have the highest number of university graduates of any country on Mars.

But for the children—often the unwanted and neglected consequences of that (a wry euphemism for recreational copulation) obtained through concubinage and 'free love'—who knew no better and had no reason to know better than their elders

[They] were the happiest one could imagine. They were dirty; in fact, they were absolutely filthy, filthy past all possible description. They were thin, foul-smelling and ugly. Some had noses missing; others had eyes gone; and the heads of still others were covered with boils and scabs. And yet . . . they all seemed extremely happy!

In describing the children of Cat Country, Lao echoes many of the same criticisms present in Dickens, whose oeuvre he knew and admired. And thus, concluded Lao's protagonist, the young the children of the Cat People—the next generation—were looked after, revealing "an index of the society and the state" and propagating continuity in the living standards and character development of the Cat society. And those standards were in open display in Cat City, the capital, where housing was crowded and cramped with "no ventilation, no light, nothing but flies, foul air, and filth" such that "[a] contagious disease like cholera or scarlet fever could sweep [the] entire city clean of all traces of life within a single week!"

Naturally, Mr. Earth observed during his brief stay on Mars that the same qualities of wise and educated leadership were in evidence in the Cat People's understanding (or lack thereof) of industry—agriculture, in their case—and economics. And so, the colossal failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward was unwittingly presaged, a point that undoubtedly would not have gone unnoticed by readers three decades later during the Cultural Revolution when such a critique would have been fatal ... for the author. The catastrophic famine and doomed backyard steel industrialization were sensitive topics—as in not to be discussed—in Mao's China, and the punishment for violating 'state secrets' was severe.

Near the end of the book, Mr. Earth and his guide, Young Scorpion, come upon a Cat soldier retreating in the face of the enemy. Young Scorpion is the jaded son of Scorpion the reverie forest land baron and the grandson of Old Scorpion the master strategist of Cat Country, and because he symbolizes the ruling class, the soldier is on a mission to kill him, reasoning as follows:

• "Every time there’s a revolution, we common folk just lose something else."
• "They never paid any attention to whether our stomachs were empty or not."
• "The ruling group couldn’t come up with any way of solving our economic problems."
• "In having us go to war against the foreigners, they tried to kill us."

Mr. Earth, himself, was perplexed that Old Scorpion and the other leaders had staged a civil war and not prepared for the imminent foreign invasion, but he was livid on witnessing the leaders racing to surrender to the foreign army in order to secure the best official positions in their service.

And yet "on the very brink of death, [the Cat People] still didn’t understand the need for cooperation." Indeed, the last two prisoners "continued their struggle until they had bitten each other to death. In this way, the Cat People themselves completed their own destruction."

At the end, now alone, Mr. Earth no longer had a society to investigate, a society to despair over or hold out hope for. The civilization of the Cat People on Mars had been terminated ... with the cooperation of the victims. This had been foreshadowed many times. For instance, on entering Cat City for the first time, Mr. Earth remarked that "this civilization will soon perish!" And so it did.

The author adds his final touch of irony and unforgiving humour by having his protagonist declare that he looked forward to returning to his 'own great, glorious free China' ... on a French spaceship no less.

While this is a dystopian satire with no apparent contribution to human progress, presumably the author was of the opinion that there is a valid role for criticism to legitimize dissent even when no immediate solution is at hand or on the horizon. For, first, the problem has to be acknowledged, and that seems to be the author's purpose in doggedly browbeating the Chinese people by means of his scathing satire of the Cat People. He could plausibly be understood as intending to raise the social consciousness of a people by having them recognize and repent from their errors (sins) and then choose a real social transformation (salvation).