Title: To Live Author: Yu Hua Creation Date: 1993 Location: China Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Yu Hua published To Live (Huozhe) in the Shanghai literary journal Shouhuo in 1993, marking a dramatic shift in his career. He had spent the 1980s as an experimentalist working in the fragmentary, disorienting registers of Borges and Kafka, producing fiction that drew admiration from literary circles and puzzlement from general readers. To Live abandoned all of that. The novel is told in a frame narrative of almost classical simplicity: a young man collecting folk songs in the Chinese countryside encounters an old peasant ploughing a field with an ancient ox and sits down to hear his story. What follows is the first-person account of Xu Fugui, a former landlord's son who gambled away his family's estate, was conscripted into the Nationalist army during the Civil War, and then spent four decades watching every person he loved die across the convulsions of modern Chinese history — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the early reform era.
The novel's power resides in its style: a plainness so complete it appears artless, though the craft required to sustain that plainness across four decades of escalating catastrophe is extraordinary. Yu Hua treats the Chinese Revolution not as a political argument to be evaluated but as weather — the thing that fell on ordinary lives from above, not chosen, not understood, endured. Zhang Yimou adapted the novel into a film in 1994 that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and was immediately banned in China. The novel itself has occupied a grey zone on the mainland ever since — intermittently permitted and restricted, available enough to defuse the charge of outright suppression, controlled enough to prevent it from achieving the cultural centrality its readership would otherwise produce.
The Banning
The censorship of To Live operates through the characteristic mechanisms of the Chinese system: not a single dramatic act of prohibition but a layered, shifting set of restrictions that differ between media and fluctuate with the political temperature. The novel was published in Shouhuo in 1993 and subsequently issued as a book. It was never formally banned in the way a Western reader might understand the term — no court order, no public decree. Instead, it existed in a grey zone, available in some bookshops, absent from others, its visibility depending on the risk tolerance of individual publishers and the prevailing political climate in any given year.
The film adaptation was a different matter entirely. Zhang Yimou completed it in 1994, and it premiered at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix, the Ecumenical Jury Prize, and Best Actor for Ge You. The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television banned it outright. The ban was driven by multiple factors: the film's critical portrayal of deaths caused directly by Party policies during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and Zhang's submission of the film to an international festival without obtaining prior government approval — a procedural transgression the authorities regarded as deliberate provocation. Zhang was reportedly barred from filmmaking for a period and prohibited from working with foreign production companies.
The distinction between the novel's grey-zone existence and the film's outright prohibition illustrates the calibrated nature of Chinese censorship. A novel read by hundreds of thousands occupies a different threat category than a film that might reach millions. The system modulates its response according to the medium's reach, the political moment, and the degree of international visibility — managing the boundary between tolerable and intolerable with a precision that is itself a form of control.
The Fallout
The consequences fell most visibly on Zhang Yimou, whose relationship with the Chinese state oscillated between punishment and rehabilitation across the decades that followed. After the ban, Zhang shifted toward less provocative material — historical epics and martial arts spectacles — and eventually became so thoroughly rehabilitated that he directed the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The trajectory from banned filmmaker to state-endorsed spectacle-maker is itself a parable about the system's capacity to absorb and redeploy its most talented artists, provided they learn which stories to stop telling.
Yu Hua's position has been more consistently complicated. He continued to live and publish in China, maintaining the balance between artistic honesty and political survival that defines every serious Chinese writer's career. His subsequent novels navigated the boundaries of the permissible with varying success. His non-fiction collection China in Ten Words, published abroad in 2011 but restricted on the mainland, was more explicitly critical than anything in his fiction — a direct commentary on the gap between official rhetoric and lived reality that the novels had rendered through indirection and narrative.
Internationally, To Live became one of the most widely read works of contemporary Chinese fiction, translated into dozens of languages and assigned in university courses worldwide. It shaped the Western understanding of the Chinese Revolution as fundamentally a story of ordinary people enduring catastrophe — not the heroic narrative of liberation the Party promoted but something more intimate. Inside China, the novel circulated through unofficial channels, creating a shared cultural reference point outside the state's sanctioned literary culture. The film, banned on screens, spread through pirated video and later through digital files, becoming one of those works whose suppression guaranteed its audience. More than two hundred thousand copies of the novel sold in China in 2011 alone — the grey zone permitting enough circulation to make outright prohibition unnecessary, restricting enough to ensure the work never achieved the prominence its readership deserved.
Why It Was Feared
The specific power of To Live is its refusal to politicise the suffering it depicts. The novel does not argue that the Chinese Revolution was wrong, or that Mao was a tyrant, or that the Communist Party betrayed the people. It simply describes what happened to one family across four decades, with a plainness that makes ideological framing impossible. The deaths are not martyrdoms. The survivors are not heroes. The system that produces the suffering is not condemned by the narrator — it is present the way weather is present, falling on people who did not choose it and cannot escape it.
The novel's most devastating scene — in which Fugui's son Youqing is bled to death by a doctor eager to save a county official's wife — resists political containment precisely because of its accidental horror. The boy does not die because the system is cruel, though it is. He does not die because the doctor is evil, though the doctor is negligent. He dies because no one is watching, because the official's wife matters more than a peasant's child, because the calculus of human value the revolution was supposed to abolish has simply been reconfigured with new categories.
What frightened the authorities was the novel's implicit argument about the relationship between the state and the individual. The Party's official account of the Maoist era acknowledged errors but insisted the suffering was the price of progress — that the system had reformed itself, that the losses had been redeemed by the gains. To Live offers no such consolation. The suffering is not the price of anything. It is simply what happened when a vast political machine operated on the bodies of people too small and too numerous to be noticed. Fugui's losses transform the revolution's human cost from a historical abstraction into a specific old man sitting in a field, talking to an ox he has named after himself, because everyone else is dead.
The Reading
The Frame
A young man collecting folk songs in the countryside encounters an old farmer plowing a field with an ancient ox. The old man talks to the ox as he works, calling it by a series of names — Fugui, Jiazhen, Youqing, Fengxia, Erxi, Kugen — as if the animal were not one creature but many. When they stop to rest, the old man tells the young man his story. He talks the way old people talk when they have finally found a listener: unhurried, circling, sometimes laughing at things that are not funny, sometimes falling silent at things that are.
The old man's name is Fugui. The ox's name is also Fugui. He bought the ox because it was about to be slaughtered, and he saw in its eyes the same exhaustion he felt in his own bones — the look of a creature that has worked its whole life and has nothing left except the fact that it is still alive. He named the ox Fugui, and he calls it by the names of his dead family, and he plows his field, and this is his life now: an old man, an old ox, a field, and the memory of everyone he has lost.
The Young Master
Fugui was born rich. His family owned a hundred and more mu of land in a village in southern China. His father was a landlord, his mother was gentle, his wife Jiazhen was the daughter of a wealthy merchant — a woman who married beneath her station because, for reasons the young Fugui could not understand, she loved him.
Fugui did not deserve her love. He was a gambler, a drunk, a frequenter of brothels, a man who carried a prostitute on his back through the streets of town to humiliate his father-in-law. He was, by his own account, a monster of selfishness and stupidity. He gambled every night, losing steadily, winning just often enough to keep him coming back. He ignored Jiazhen's pleas. He ignored his father's warnings. He ignored everything except the click of tiles and the promise of the next hand.
One night, he lost everything. The land, the house, the family fortune — all of it gone to a man named Long Er, a professional gambler who had been slowly, patiently, methodically stripping Fugui of every mu. Fugui came home to tell his father. The old man did not shout. He did not weep. He sat down, quietly, and a few days later he was dead. Fugui had killed his father as surely as if he had put a knife in his chest.
The family moved from the great house to a thatched cottage. Jiazhen's father came and took her away, pregnant with their second child. Fugui's mother fell ill. Fugui, who had never worked a day in his life, went to Long Er and rented back a piece of his own family's land. He learned to farm. His hands, soft from a lifetime of leisure, blistered and bled and hardened. He discovered that he was not, after all, incapable of labour. He discovered that the simple rhythm of planting and harvesting had a dignity that his former life had lacked.
Jiazhen came back. She came back carrying their newborn son, Youqing, and leading their daughter, Fengxia, by the hand. She had left her father's comfortable house and walked back to the thatched cottage because she loved Fugui — not the rich young master but the broken, humbled farmer who was finally, for the first time in his life, trying. "I'm not coming back for you," she said. "I'm coming back because the children need a father." But they both knew it was more than that.
The Civil War
The Kuomintang army came to the village and conscripted Fugui. He was pulled off the road, given a rifle, and marched north to fight the Communists. He had no politics. He had no opinions about the war. He wanted to go home to his wife and children and his field. Instead, he was thrown into the chaos of the Chinese Civil War — the great convulsion that would determine whether Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong would rule China.
The fighting was senseless and brutal. Fugui's unit was surrounded, starved, decimated. Men died of dysentery, of bullets, of cold, of despair. Fugui survived by the animal instinct that would sustain him through every subsequent catastrophe: he did not think about tomorrow; he thought about the next hour, the next meal, the next breath. He found a companion, an older soldier named Chunsheng, and they kept each other alive through the siege, huddling together for warmth, sharing whatever food they could scavenge.
When the Communists overran their position, Fugui expected to be killed. Instead, the People's Liberation Army gave the captured soldiers a choice: join or go home. Fugui went home. He walked for days, surviving on scraps, until he arrived at the thatched cottage and found Jiazhen waiting. His mother had died while he was away. His daughter Fengxia had fallen ill with a fever and lost her hearing and her speech. She was deaf and mute. Fugui held her and wept.
But he was alive, and his family was alive, and by a stroke of perverse fortune, the loss of his wealth now saved his life. The Communists' land reform campaign targeted landlords. Long Er, the man who had won Fugui's land, was classified as a landlord and was shot. The land was redistributed. Fugui, who owned nothing, was classified as a poor peasant — a good class, a safe class. The very ruin that his gambling had brought upon him had placed him on the right side of history's most arbitrary line.
"If I hadn't lost the land," Fugui tells the young man, "I'd have been the one they shot."
The Great Leap Forward
The late 1950s brought Mao's Great Leap Forward — the campaign to transform China from an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse in a few years. The village's iron pots, tools, and door hinges were confiscated and melted down in backyard furnaces to produce steel — steel that was useless, brittle, worthless, but that satisfied the quotas that the cadres reported upward. The crops were collectivised. The grain was taken. The villages starved.
Fugui's son Youqing was a bright, energetic boy who loved running. He ran everywhere — to school, to the fields, through the village streets — with the tireless, joyful energy of childhood. He had a pair of lambs that he doted on, and when the commune demanded them, he cried for days.
Then the district chief's wife needed a blood transfusion. She had the same blood type as Youqing. The boy was taken to the hospital and the doctors drew blood from him — too much, far too much, a fatal amount, because the district chief's wife was important and the boy was just a peasant's son. Youqing bled to death in the hospital. He was twelve years old.
Yu Hua writes this scene with the flat, terrible simplicity that is the book's signature. There is no melodrama. There is no rhetoric. There is just Fugui running to the hospital and finding his son's body, small and white on the table, drained of blood. He carries the boy home on his back. He digs the grave himself, in the field behind the cottage, near the spot where his father and mother are buried. Jiazhen collapses. She will never fully recover.
Fengxia
Fengxia, the deaf-mute daughter, grows into a beautiful and kind young woman. Despite her disabilities, she works hard, she is gentle, she communicates through gestures and smiles that endear her to the village. The family finds her a husband: Erxi, a simple, good-natured man who works as a porter, carrying loads on his back for a living. He is physically strong, devoted to Fengxia, and grateful to have a wife. They are happy — genuinely, simply happy — in a way that seems, in the economy of this novel, almost dangerous.
Fengxia becomes pregnant. The family is overjoyed. Fugui and Jiazhen see in the coming grandchild the continuation of the family, the proof that life goes on despite everything. Fengxia goes to the hospital to deliver.
She dies in childbirth. She haemorrhages and the doctors cannot stop the bleeding. Yu Hua does not dramatise the death. He simply reports it: Fengxia died. The baby survived — a boy, whom they name Kugen, "Bitter Root." Fugui stands outside the hospital, the same hospital where Youqing bled to death, and now his daughter is dead inside it too, and he has a grandson who will never know his mother.
The Cultural Revolution and After
The Cultural Revolution arrives, and with it a new round of arbitrary cruelty. Erxi, Fengxia's widower, is crushed to death in an accident at a construction site — two cement slabs fall on him while he works. He dies instantly. Little Kugen is left an orphan, raised by Fugui and Jiazhen.
Jiazhen, who has been ill for years — a wasting sickness that may be grief made physical — finally dies. She dies quietly, in the cottage, with Fugui beside her. "She went softly," Fugui says. "Like she was falling asleep." He buries her next to Youqing and Fengxia, in the family's plot behind the field.
Now it is just Fugui and Kugen, the old man and the small boy. Kugen is all that remains of the family — the last thread connecting Fugui to everyone he has loved. He dotes on the child with the tenderness of a man who knows that love is the most dangerous thing in the world because everything you love can be taken from you.
Kugen dies. He dies in a way that is almost absurd in its cruelty: he eats too many beans. The family has been so poor for so long that the boy has never had enough to eat, and when Fugui boils a pot of beans — a rare treat — Kugen gorges himself. His small stomach cannot handle it. He chokes. He dies. A child killed by abundance after a lifetime of scarcity. It is the most devastating death in the novel because it is the most meaningless — not caused by politics, not caused by history, not caused by the cruelty of institutions, but by the simple, stupid randomness of a world that does not care.
The Old Man and the Ox
Fugui is alone. Everyone he has loved is dead: his parents, his wife, his son, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson. He is an old man with nothing but a field, a cottage, and the memory of seven graves.
He buys the old ox. He names it Fugui. He talks to it as he plows, calling it by the names of his dead — "Come on, Jiazhen, pull a little harder" — and the ox, patient and exhausted, pulls the plow through the earth, and together they make their slow way across the field.
The young man listening to this story expects despair. He expects bitterness, rage, a curse against the heavens. Instead, Fugui laughs. Not the laugh of madness but the laugh of a man who has passed through everything and come out the other side into a place where the simple fact of being alive — the sun on the field, the weight of the ox against the harness, the sound of evening birds — is enough. Not good enough, not acceptable, not just — merely enough. He is alive. He breathes. He plows.
"I've had a hard life," Fugui says, "but I've lived it. That's all. I've lived it."
Yu Hua does not judge. He does not point a moral. He does not rage against the political systems that killed Fugui's family — the feudal landlord system, the Kuomintang's war, the Communist Party's famine and terror. The novel contains all of these things, but it does not argue about them. It simply shows one man's life, stripped of everything, reduced to the barest possible elements — breath, labour, memory — and asks: is this enough? Is the act of living, in itself, sufficient?
The answer the novel gives is not yes. It is not no. It is the image of the old man and the old ox walking together through the field as the sun goes down, the sound of Fugui's voice naming his dead, the earth turning under the plow, the stubborn, incomprehensible persistence of being alive in a world that has given you every reason to die.
The standard edition — Michael Berry's translation with his critical afterword. Also available as a Kindle edition.
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