Little trouble in big China

She wrote about love and sex in Shanghai and the government burned her book. Now Wei Hui is rising from the ashes as an international phenomenon, speaking for a generation who are ditching communism for hedonism

THAT's the trouble with enemies of the people, the people can't tell who they are. You'd think there'd be some sort of dress code. Trenchcoat? Check. Prosthetic facial hair? Yup. Steaming black globe with BOMB painted on in white capitals? You get the idea.

Wei Hui (let's get this out of the way early, it's pronounced Way- Way, don't ask why, it just is, okay?) doesn't have any of that stuff. She doesn't sport a fake moustache - or a real one, for that matter - and the only thing that's steaming is the mug, which sits in front of her, giving off a decidedly non-oriental aroma, eau de Tetley.

She isn't everyone's cup of tea, though. The Chinese Government hate and fear Wei Hui. To them she is "decadent, debauched and a slave to foreign culture". But just look at her, this tiny 28-year- old, her round face framed by a gothic arch of jet hair, sitting in a London hotel thousands of miles from home. She looks like a lost child. What can she possibly have done?

The short answer is that she wrote a book. Shanghai Baby is the story of a young Chinese waitress called Coco who quits her job, moves in with her boyfriend, Tian Tian, and writes a novel. But Tian Tian is impotent and so Coco starts meeting Mark, a visiting German businessman, for lashings and lashings of explicitly described sex. Meanwhile, Tian Tian, whose head is messed up because he suspects his mother killed his father, moves out of the apartment and becomes a morphine addict.

Shanghai Baby, which is partly based on Wei Hui's own life, was published in China 19 months ago to instant success, shifting around 130,000 copies. Then, last April, the government condemned the book as pornographic and banned it. Wei Hui only discovered this when she phoned her publisher to discuss royalties. "I felt blank in my brain," she recalls with a nervous gasp of a laugh. "No hatred, no fear, just a blank. It was a very real feeling." The publisher, China's biggest, has been severely punished by the government. The chief executive was dismissed and staff were not paid for six months.

Wei Hui is not exactly what you'd call a conformist, but she has lived her entire life in a society where this kind of disapproval by the state is not taken lightly. Imagine then how she must have felt when the Chinese Press and Publishers Bureau - the government wing responsible for censorship - burned the 40,000 remaining copies of her book.

This was a grand gesture which backfired. The novel started appearing on the internet and in pirated editions sold, among other places, from stalls outside clubs. It is now estimated that there are anywhere between five and 13 million copies of Shanghai Baby in circulation in China.

The rest of the world is playing catch-up. Wei Hui's story is a media dream and, on this short trip to Britain, she has done the rounds of TV interviews, turned down Richard and Judy, been invited to a party by Tony Parsons (she didn't go), appeared on the radio with Julie Burchill and got a bit narked at Nicky Campbell when he pronounced her name incorrectly.

This media circus could not be more different from the situation in China where Shanghai Baby is a forbidden text, dog-eared paperbacks passed from friend to friend, discussed in whispers and devoured with a shiver of delicious taboo. It's author, however, remains rather mystified by the fuss. "It is only a love story," she sighs, sipping tea.

WEI HUI - or Zhou Wei Hui to give her the full name which she does not use - was born in Ning Bo City, a two-hour drive from Shanghai. Her father is a big noise in the army and she spent her childhood moving between military bases. "My parents are very conventional," she says. "And like a normal Chinese family, parents always lack communication with children. We love each other, but we never talk about my writing, my career, my achievement. Maybe this is quite a sad thing, but thinking positively, it was this background which made me want to grow up independent."

Her earliest memory comes from the days when they were living in an abandoned temple on an island. It is the day Mao Zedong died and Wei Hui is three years old. She remembers having to wear a white flower in her hair and a black armband. Because of the death of the Chinese leader, the base is on alert, there is a blackout in force, and the troops have left the temple for tunnels within a nearby mountain. Wei Hui cries and cries for her father, the highest ranking officer on the base, and won't stop until she is carried into the mountain to see him. She remembers the absolute darkness, the sense of shared grief, the shrieking of birds or bats within the tunnel.

Wei Hui's broken English, her linguistic inability to descend into cliche, gives much of what she says the poetic force evident in this anecdote. Even when dispensing dry facts, she can come across like a talking fortune cookie: "Shanghai women steal both hearts and wallets."