In a year ending with a 5, a talented author published an astonishing allegorical work of short fiction. Its plot blurs the line between the human and non-human realms, and many consider it one of his two masterpieces. It is often discussed and sometimes published bundled together with a dystopian tale he wrote later about a man trapped in an oppressive system. The works of this writer, who died of tuberculosis while just in his forties, could only be read in secret in the Soviet Union for nearly all its history, and they were taboo in Mao’s China, though they began to be sold in bookstores there in the 1980s. His most famous works continue to generate critical discussion and there is a prize for writers bearing his name.  Run an Internet search for him and the titles of his most famous works and you will see everything from a mug that pairs him with Aldous Huxley, to the name of a commercial venture in China, to the title of a Haruki Murakami novel. Commentaries that use the adjective derived from his name often refer to life in Communist Party-run settings but also to other places. Recent ones, for example, have used it to describe Beijing’s tightening control over Hong Kong and the Burmese junta’s actions in Myanmar.

This paragraph could be about Eric Blair (1903-50) who gained fame using the pen name George Orwell.

Bookshops sometimes sell Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) bundled together, and each June there is an Orwell Prize ceremony in London. A reminder of the author’s status as a taboo author in Cold War-era Communist capitals comes in a vignette in the recent prize-winning book on Soviet dissidents by Benjamin Nathans that describes an underground reading of his work in Moscow in the 1960s. As for the mug, it has Orwell’s name above Huxley’s, and last time I checked it could be purchased for $20. As for the Murakami novel and Chinese business venture, the title of the Japanese author’s IQ84 and the ‘1984 Bookstore’ that operated in Shanghai in the early 2000s both nod to Orwell’s last book. As for the adjective, journalists and pundits have described the National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 as an ‘Orwellian’ move, and they have written that the Burmese junta has made Myanmar a quintessentially ‘Orwellian’ place.

Could my opening paragraph refer only to the creator of Big Brother who has obsessed me for decades? Until recently, I would have said yes, it could only be about Orwell.

I now know I would have been wrong.

There is another creator of two masterpieces about whom every word in that paragraph could have been written.

That author was Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

Metamorphosis was published in 1915 and it is sometimes sold together with The Trial.

A Kafka Prize is awarded in Prague.

Murakami’s oeuvre includes Kafka on the Shore.

As for the vignette I mentioned about Orwell’s work being shared in secret at a Moscow gathering, Nathans describes work by Kafka being read aloud at that same event.

On the mug, Kafka’s name comes below Orwell and Huxley’s.

As for a business in China, just as you could buy dystopian novels at a ‘1984 Bookstore’ in Shanghai in the 2010s, you could also purchase a mattress then from the Suzhou Kafka Furniture Company Limited.

Turning to adjectives, London-based columnist Cindy Yu recently described the persecution of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong as ‘Kafkaesque,’ and that same term is often used to refer to actions by the Burmese junta.

There is nothing original about pairing Orwell and Kafka, but I have yet to see anyone bring them together in a discussion focusing specifically on Asia. There are also some obvious ways that concentrating on the continent can accentuate a sense that there are major contrasts between the two authors. Orwell was born in India and later worked in Burma, but Kafka never set foot in Asia. Kafka set fiction in China, but Orwell did not. Orwell, unlike Kafka, wrote a lot about Burma. And Orwell did not evince any special interest in Chinese philosophy, while Kafka kept copies of Taoist classics by his desk.

There also tends to be a divergence in the way that commentators on Asian politics have deployed Orwellian and Kafkaesque as adjectives. The standard pattern is for them to focus on the Orwellian more than the Kafkaesque when writing about countries under Communist rule. It is true that there are some notable works, such as Peter Hessler’s recent book Other Rivers, that present today’s China as a place that combines intense surveillance and Newspeak-like propaganda that seem ‘Orwellian’ with irrational and convoluted bureaucratic procedures that create ‘Kafkaesque’ situations. Still, these are exceptions to the standard pattern. Overall, one finds far more references to just Orwell as opposed to just Kafka in foreign commentaries on post-1949 China, and the same goes for ones on North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Still, the Orwell and Kafka parallels I worked into my opening paragraph are not the only ones related to Asia I discovered when reading up on the author of Metamorphosis and The Trial. The most intriguing additional point of connection relates to the ways Chinese readers and writers have become aware of their works since the 1940s. As far as I can tell, neither author got a lot of attention in China before the Second World War, then each garnered some fans in Chinese literary circles in the mid-1940s. After that, though, there were decades when their works were openly accessible in Taiwan but not in the People’s Republic of China, though they were read by some surreptitiously there.

The status of both authors changed in lockstep during the Reform era that began a few years after the death of Mao Zedong (1893-1976). Translations of their masterpieces, as well as of various short stories by Kafka, came out in the late 1970s, initially appearing in specialist venues and meant for limited readerships. A few years later, their works began to be sold in bookstores without being designated as neibu (internal circulation only). Soon books by them were joined by works about them that treated Orwell and Kafka appreciatively. By the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, each was being treated as a major author to learn from rather than as a decadent or dangerous one who should be denounced, as was conventional in Mao’s day.

Interestingly, this chronology meant that many of the country’s most important living writers read their first works by Orwell and Kafka at roughly the same time, and at roughly the same time as they became familiar with a host of other foreign authors from various decades of the 20th century who also first made it into PRC bookshops in the 1980s. Some of these young readers who would in time become noted writers certainly knew that they were reading authors who belonged to different generations. But the fact that everyone from Orwell and Kafka to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, and Italo Calvino were all coming into broad circulation in China simultaneously made it easy to treat a disparate set of literary figures, including some whose books predated the Mao era and some whose books came out during and after it, as part of a single group.

Kafka died before Orwell existed, as Blair did not begin to use that pen name until the 1930s. Nevertheless, the two were encountered by many readers in the People’s Republic of China as if they were contemporaries. And as Orwell and Kafka first began to influence Chinese literary figures, they did so in tandem with other ‘new’ writers from abroad who garnered fans. The broad group of ‘modern’ writers to which Kafka and Orwell were seen as belonging included other long dead and formerly taboo authors, including those already mentioned such as Joyce (1882-1941), Woolf (1882-1941), Calvino (1923-85), and Kundera (1929-2023), as well as Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) and Murakami (1949-). Readers were aware of stylistic and other distinctions among these authors, as well as between all of them and other ‘new’ ones, such as Beckett and Borges and Camus. But the sense of generational differences among all these figures was blurry at best. In a late essay, Orwell mapped out differences between European writers who wrote primarily or exclusively before the First World War and those who came a bit later, but these and other chronological categorisation schemes often seemed less important to Chinese readers than when an author’s works had become available in China.

Even though going down a Kafka rabbit hole with Orwell and Asia on my mind led me to find more parallels than I had expected between the authors, it also resulted in discovering a contrast that surprised me. I thought that there might be roughly similar numbers of Orwell and Kafka devotees among Chinese writers who were born during or not long before the start of the Mao era. If anything, I expected to find a larger number of intense fans of the creator of Big Brother than of the creator of Josef K among such authors. This was not the case. It is hard to quantify exactly how great the influence of any two writers is on a set of authors, but my sense from reading around on the topic is that there has been much more admiration for Kafka than for Orwell and a much more determined desire to learn from Kafka’s works than from Orwell’s among notable Chinese literary figures who grew up in Mao’s China.

How widespread is the admiration for Kafka among these authors? He is rated highly by Mo Yan (born 1955), the first person living in the PRC to win the Nobel Prize for literature. When Gao Xijian (born 1940) became a laureate earlier while living in exile in France, he referred to Kafka but not Orwell in his Nobel speech. Can Xue (born 1953), who is one of the two writers living in the PRC most often touted as a potential future Nobel Prize winner, wrote an essay called ‘Kafka and I’, which is now also the title of a collection of her short works translated gracefully into English by Deanna Ren. Yan Lianke (born 1958), the other writer based in China regularly described as a potential future Nobel winner, has made positive comments about both Orwell and Kafka. He presents the latter, though, as having had the greater influence on his work.

In addition, both of my favorite writers who were children in China during the Mao era, Yu Hua (born 1960) and Xue Yiwei (born 1964), have been outspoken about their fondness for and debt to Kafka. Yu often tells the story of being so eager to secure a copy of Kafka’s collection of stories at a time early in the Reform era when books were published and then often went out of print quickly that he convinced a friend in real estate to accept a copy of the easier to secure War and Peace in exchange for that set of tales. His friend, a pragmatist, was pleased to have gotten the most pages. Yu Hua, more of a dreamer, felt that he had done better.

Yu, who lives in Beijing, also recounted in Paris Review recently that the first story by Kafka he read was ‘A Country Doctor’, in which ‘horses’ suddenly ‘appear out of nowhere’ when the eponymous physician summons them. The steeds then disappear when the protagonist wants them to leave. ‘Oh, to summon something’ simply with your thoughts seemed a wondrous talent, the author claims. He says that via that story ‘Kafka taught’ him a ‘kind of freedom.’

Xue, who has been based in Canada for decades, is just as passionate about Kafka. When I asked him about the author of The Trial, he told me he had read Kafka in Chinese translation and liked what he read. Then he saw that Kundera, another writer who had caught his attention, had claimed that reading Kafka in any language other than German did not really count. So, he struggled to read Kafka in German. He later wrote an essay ‘based on’ that ‘arrogant statement’ of Kundera’s.

Xue and Yu, like most of the other authors mentioned so far, place their regard for Kafka in the same category as their regard for some other writers whose works began to become available in China around the same time. For Xue, Calvino and Joyce are beside Kafka in his personal pantheon. Yu refers to Márquez as among those who, like Kafka, influenced him a lot. Not so, for Can, as she clearly treats Kafka as standing out dramatically from all other writers as one whose works spoke to her and set her on the road to becoming an author. Among those I have mentioned, though, Yan is the only one who has had much to say about Orwell.

This does not mean that there are no fans of the creator of Big Brother among authors who experienced life in Mao’s China. Two writers, both born in 1953 and now based abroad, one in London and the other in St Louis, certainly qualify as these. The London-based one is Ma Jian, whose books include Beijing Coma and who is quoted at the start of this section. The one who lives in Missouri is Qiu Xiaolong, the creator of Inspector Chen mysteries such as Love and Murder in the Time of Covid, which is filled with references to Nineteen Eighty-Four. A third Chinese author worth mentioning, who professed a deep appreciation for Orwell and cited his discovery of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a pivotal moment in his intellectual development, is Wang Xiaobo (1952-97). Still, on balance, to play on the title of a 2024 BBC series, if one thinks in Kafka vs. Orwell terms, the former outdoes the latter when it comes to the degree each has influenced Chinese writers who experienced at least part of the Mao era.

What accounts for this? I am not sure, but a few factors are worth mentioning as possible contributing ones, especially if we focus on Nineteen Eighty-Four as the Orwell work that has won the most attention in China.

One factor is that the style of Orwell’s last novel is realistic, despite being set in an imaginary future. After growing up on a diet limited to socialist realist fare, some readers born between the 1940s and 1960s may have hungered for greater experimentation and at least a touch of the absurd. In addition, Orwell could be funny, but he was not in that book. If readers longed for playful writing, flights of fancy, and humour, these were things that they found more of in Kafka than in Orwell. This might also explain why some authors, like Mo Yan, seem to have been more drawn to Animal Farm than to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A second factor could be that more foreign writers who gained large followings in China in the 1980s and 1990s expressed their admiration for Kafka than for Orwell. Borges, Calvino and, above all, Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is said, at least for a time, to have been the translated work that sold the most copies in Reform-era China, were all influential figures, and all cited Kafka though not Orwell as a primary source of inspiration. It is true that Murakami, another popular writer in China in that period, did claim an affinity to Kafka and Orwell. This was set off, though, by a rage for Kundera – who not only praised Kafka but disparaged Orwell.

A third factor to consider is that some people encountering Nineteen Eighty-Four and Kafka’s stories for the first time during the 1980s through early 2000s might have seen the former as illuminating China’s past but not its present, while the latter illuminated the current era as well as earlier years. It is important to remember here that Orwell’s Big Brother novel is not just about surveillance, control and Newspeak lies, but also about life in a setting of limited forms of entertainment and consumer goods, where intense rituals of collective denunciation called ‘Two Minutes Hate’ are important. These characteristics fit the PRC in Mao’s time more than in that of Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Wang Xiaobo claimed that reading Nineteen Eighty-Four when he ‘was in college in the 1980s’ was ‘an unforgettable experience’ precisely because it felt not like ‘dystopian fiction’ but like ‘history’. Not coincidentally, he set his most important Orwell-influenced story, Golden Age, in the past, during the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, here is how one reader who posted about Orwell’s book at the Goodreads-like site Douban:

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is a fictional work by a British writer, but I believe that reading it will have a spine-tingling effect on any Chinese person. Isn’t this [what] they experienced more than 40 years ago?

In addition, there are ways in which Kafka more than Orwell speaks to a key element of life in both the Mao era and what has followed: the ease with which one can be trapped in or simply confused by a complicated, irrational and hard to navigate bureaucracy. This is something I can relate to directly. When I first spent time there in the mid-1980s, I found it less Orwellian but more Kafkaesque than I had expected.

Take access to documents, for example. I thought I might be rebuffed at Shanghai archives when trying to research political events of even the pre-1949 era. I would have seen that as Orwellian. In fact, though, I was generally allowed into the archives I wanted to use and given materials. Sometimes, though, when I asked for the same materials a second time, I would be told they did not exist, and they had never been held there. If I asked a third time, they might appear, and when I said this was strange, I was told they had always been available. Just as in the Kafka story beloved by Yu Hua in which horses appear and disappear in curious ways, so did these documents.

In the decades since then, I have sometimes felt that the PRC has become more Orwellian, especially in places such as Tibet and Xinjiang. At other times, I have felt it has become less Orwellian and more like the rule-via-distraction-and-hedonism setting that Huxley, who taught a young Eric Blair at Eton, described in Brave New World, especially, again, in some parts of the country, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. In the last dozen years, I’ve felt a general tilt toward the Orwellian and away from the Huxleyan under Xi Jinping, due partly to the return of a mode of rule featuring a personality cult.

When it comes to the country seeming Kafkaesque, there has been more consistency. There are always novelties to how exactly Chinese facts can bring Kafka’s fiction to mind. But a fitting tale with which to end this essay is about Yan Lianke winning an award.

In 2014, the judges in Prague gave him the Kafka Prize. They chose him mainly to honour novels he had written that could not be published in China, which made it a different sort of award than the Chinese prizes he won early in his career for books that did not get censored. This fact did not stop the official media from using his win as an occasion for boasting. It was a cause for celebration, they said, that a Chinese writer was being celebrated in the Czech Republic. Yan was only the second Asian writer ever to get it, some stories in the Communist Party media stressed, noting that the only previous author from the continent to get the award had been the globally renowned Japanese author Murakami (who was also popular in China).

In a fully Orwellian setting, publishing fiction that raised red flags among the censors might have landed Yan in prison and made him an unperson. In Kafkaesque China, when there was something that he did that could be seen as bringing honour to the nation, the official press could brag away. In doing so, they just had to handle one part of the story in a special way. In some reports, there is a passing and euphemistically phrased mention of Yan’s later works occasionally leading to him getting ‘caught up in controversies’. In other reports, though, the authors just ignore this troubling detail. These leave Chinese readers with the impression that there have never been any problems with Yan publishing his books in his homeland.