Cat Country in 10 Minutes — A Rotted Civilisation Feeding Itself into Rubble

Around him move the Cat People. Lao She isn't writing individuals; he's writing types: the ruling class that lives off its monopoly on reverie leaf, women like the minister's wife included; the students who can recite the word new and do nothing else; the soldiers who bully civilians and bolt at the first sign of an enemy; the ordinary old men robbed and trampled in the street. The Cat People's appearance is kept uniform throughout, long fur, large eyes, upright posture, robes, with nothing that would let a reader pin them to any real-world ethnicity.

The whole of Mars is built to look nothing like screen science fiction: no aircraft, no sense of the future, only the reverie-leaf forest outside the city walls, windowless houses standing in rows, low hills on the horizon, and a red sky overhead. This is Lao She's Mars. Strip away the science-fiction skin and what's underneath is the rotting corpse of an old world.

The plot

The day his plane comes down in the red dirt, the Cat People carry the narrator into Cat City like a curiosity. He's stunned the moment he arrives, not by alien terror but by a dispiriting familiarity. The houses are old houses, the streets are old streets, the people are old people. This scene sets the key for the whole book: Mars is only scenery. What Lao She is writing about is the ground under his own feet.

Within days of settling in, he finds the city's soft spot: reverie leaf. The forest outside the walls is the whole city's lifeline. The leaf can serve as food or as narcotic. Whoever controls the forest grows fat and idle on it; everyone else uses it to go numb. This isn't a realistic drug so much as Lao She's monument to opium, an allegory for a narcotic of the spirit. He takes the image only this far and no further. He never lingers on scenes of smoking; the symbol is all he wants.

Turn that one key and the whole city rattles apart. The schools are open, but the sign on the gate advertises diplomas for sale. The museum stands full of empty cases, their contents long since carried off by the city's own people. Students in the latest fashion cluster on the street, mouths full of the newest terms, then turn around and fight over reverie leaves to chew. Lao She never scolds them. He just makes the narrator keep watching.

The part that hurts most is the section on soldiers. Cat Country's army is vicious guarding the reverie-leaf forest and rough with civilians, but let a foreign enemy show up and they outrun everyone. Lao She never writes an actual battle. He writes a collapse: overnight the troops scatter, the forest goes unguarded, the city gates stand unopened. A military built only to put down its own people turns out to be hollow the moment it faces an outsider. This is his cleanest cut.

The self-styled progressives at the schools are even harder to watch. The word new never leaves their mouths, new vocabulary, new institutions, new spirit, but ask them to actually do something and they turn straight to fighting over reverie leaves, selling diplomas, taking the shortcut. Lao She's own generation had just lived through the New Culture Movement, and had seen too many new words sitting on the same old mud.

The foreign enemy is called the Dwarf Soldiers. Lao She deliberately withholds what they look like, what language they speak, any feature that would mark their ethnicity. He lets them appear only at a distance, a dark mass of silhouettes pressing toward the city wall. The choice is deliberate. This is allegory, not an accusation aimed at any one people, and the various readings later generations have pinned to it were never part of Lao She's plan.