Truth and Amnesia in Contemporary China

For Yan Lianke, writing is a search for truth. After years of producing propaganda for the Chinese military, the celebrated novelist has had enough of the self-censorship he sees in the country’s literary scene. In China, he claims, amnesia trumps memory.  Lianke’s novels go against this tendency by revisiting topics like the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the AIDS epidemic with a biting wit. In his increasingly “unpublishable” satire, he confronts Chinese society with the unsettling questions that were cast aside in the country’s bid to become an economic superpower. On this very special evening, Yan Lianke will share with us his view of how censorship, memory and freedom of expression have shaped China’s remarkable transformation, in a conversation with Manel Ollé, full professor in the history and culture of modern and contemporary China for the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.