Metabolic Dystopia in Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine

This article reinterprets Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine (1992) as a dystopian allegory that transforms political satire into a critique of bureaucratic temporality, narrative sovereignty, and grotesque embodiment. While previous scholarship has emphasized the novel’s allegorical excess or metafictional play, few have explored how its temporal, narrative, and corporeal experiments collectively articulate a dystopian vision. Through the intertwined mechanisms of magical temporality, administrative delay, and metafictional disruption, the novel dramatizes how institutional power reproduces itself through ritualized consumption – of food, bodies, and narratives. By literalizing biopolitical control in scenes of cannibalistic feasting and bureaucratic paralysis, Mo Yan exposes sovereignty as performative and unstable, collapsing governance into appetite and absurd ritual. Ultimately, The Republic of Wine expands the formal and thematic boundaries of dystopian literature, situating Chinese experimental fiction within global debates on power, embodiment, and narrative form.