Mai Jia, a top-selling Chinese espionage novelist and former soldier, has been writing about secrets for years.
In his half-dozen novels, Mr. Mai, who has sold millions of books and won many Chinese literary awards, including the Mao Dun Literature Prize, describes intrigue at home that most Chinese, let alone non-Chinese, know nothing about.
But his work has taken on a new sense of urgency as the world adjusts to the scale of surveillance by American intelligence agencies that has been revealed by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency in the United States.
Mr. Mai says his message, available for the first time in English next month when his novel ‘‘Decoded’’ comes out in the United States and Britain, is about more than China; it’s about the world.
‘‘I feel this world is filled with secrets. People are very secretive. People are animals that are very protective of themselves,’’ he said over lunch in an upscale development in the hills west of Hangzhou, the city where he lives. ‘‘Those of us who went through the Cultural Revolution have experienced how truth and falsehood can’t be distinguished. The truth is not ‘out there,’’’ he said, a glimmer in his eyes.
There is a secretive quality to Mr. Mai too. ‘‘I’m mildly socially phobic,’’ he said. The author, 50, spent 17 years in the People’s Liberation Army, some of that time among top-secret cryptographers in an undisclosed location, he said. Bullied as a child for being from a politically ‘‘bad’’ family, paradise for him is a secluded library, as it was for Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, his literary hero.
In ‘‘Decoded,’’ the main character, Rong Jinzhen, is an autistic math genius from an illustrious family, his talent and burden symbolized by a too-large head. He is hired by the military’s top secret Unit 701 to break two highly advanced codes — Code Purple and Code Black, both created by China’s No. 1, though unnamed, enemy. Rong experiences existential loneliness, loss and finally madness.
Rong and Mr. Snowden are two sides of the same coin, Mr. Mai said. ‘‘Both Snowden and Rong Jinzhen were abandoned by God,’’ he said. ‘‘The tragedy is that there are quite a few people like that in every country. Honestly, what Snowden revealed wasn’t America’s ugliness but today’s world. It has been hijacked by technology and whether we’re talking about Country Y or Country X I’m afraid I truly believe that as long as we use these technologies what we’ll get is this shady business.’’
Mr. Mai was born Jiang Benhu in 1964 (he changed his name as an adult) in Fuyang outside Hangzhou. He is lionized at home for his novels, some serialized for television or filmed. After ‘‘Decoded,’’ released in Chinese in 2002, came ‘‘In the Dark,’’ ‘‘The Message,’’ the ‘‘Whispers on the Wind’’ trilogy and ‘‘Knifepoint.’’ Translations into other languages are underway, said his agent, Gray Tan, who is based in Taiwan.
Zhang Yiwu, a Peking University professor of Chinese literature, said in an interview with the Beijing newspaper Jinghua Times: ‘‘Usually I find the trouble with detective and spy fiction is that the spirit is too mathematical, there’s no human character or feelings. With Mai Jia’s works there’s a mathematical spirit, but also human character and feelings.’’
What Westerners may be discovering about espionage — its ubiquity — Chinese have always lived with, David Der-Wei Wang, the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview. ‘‘Spying, encryption, intrigue and secrecy,’’ he said, ‘‘have been part of human political and military engagement since ancient times.’’
That is especially evident in one-party states, like China, where the authorities have uncontested insight into people’s lives. ‘‘Mai Jia and his characters would argue that the ‘art’ and politics of spying and encryption are already ingrained in every level of our life,’’ Mr. Wang said. He added: ‘‘Heroes and heroines are accidental individual, even existential, figures, groping for a meaning that is always one step beyond full understanding.’’
It’s a bleak vision. Mr. Mai said he was a ‘‘pessimist’’ about human nature.
His style is a mixture of ‘‘revolutionary historical romance, spy fiction perhaps inspired by Western sources, and the psychological thriller,’’ Mr. Wang said.
For Mr. Mai, entering the army at 17 was an escape from a difficult childhood. His family represented three dangerous ‘‘affronts’’ in the politics of the early People’s Republic of China: ‘‘landlord, religious and right.’’ One grandfather was a well-off farmer, one a Christian; his father was a ‘‘rightist’’ — in reality, Mr. Mai said, his father was picked to fill the commune’s quota of political enemies because he talked a lot and ‘‘exaggerated things.’’
As a soldier he read whenever he could and shot guns as little as possible. He spent one of three years in Tibet in the early 1990s reading a single book: Borges’s short stories, ‘‘The Book of Sand.’’ Other literary loves are Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig. ‘‘I loved Zweig because he wrote about fantastical people. And I wasn’t an ordinary person either.’’ Eventually, he left the army to write full time.
A lonely child, he kept a diary to have something to confide in. It has grown to 36 volumes. ‘‘I really grew up outside of society,’’ he said. ‘‘A formless wall surrounded me. I was very sealed off. But by being sealed off I was very strong. I lived in my imagination.’’
As if to illustrate that, the Chinese edition of ‘‘Whispers on the Wind’’ has a photograph of Mr. Mai on his daily jog in Hangzhou’s Botanical Gardens, on a path he stamped out with his own feet. ‘‘Clamor is our enemy,’’ is written underneath.
‘‘Literature is a higher calling than politics,’’ he said in the interview. Later, in an email, he elaborated: ‘‘Literature gave me breadth and calm. God is by me. And I dare to talk with the devil.’’