ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Dream of Ding Village (2006), the Chinese version of The Plague, and a macabre story filled with death caused by AIDS, by the award-winning yet controversial writer Yan Lianke. It discusses how the daring novel shows concern for the biopolitical situation of the Chinese people, and how it spearheads its criticism on the “blood economy” that encouraged people to sell their blood and ended up causing an AIDS epidemic in central China in the 1990s. Through studying the mythorealistic elements such as the unconventional narrative voice and the experimental structure of the novel, this article examines the thanatopolitics characteristic of the story; it also demonstrates how the novel makes parts of the real illusory and imaginary, and how this technique serves to create a wider and deeper blurred space between reality and unreality to highlight the irrational and crazy materialistic desire of human beings, which leads to an absurd and ill-practiced modernization on the one hand, and makes it convenient for the author to practice self-censorship on the other hand, and how this practice affects the narrative in the artistic and realistic dimensions.
