His series of thrillers around the historian and cryptologist Tomás Noronha, sold millions of copies worldwide, earned him the nickname the Portuguese Dan Brown. With his most recent title, The Woman with the Red Dragon, he exposes the atrocities of Chinese re-education camps while drawing inspiration from real events. We met José Rodrigues dos Santos during his visit to the Montreal Book Fair.
I’m still a war reporter. Besides, I was supposed to be in Israel this week, but I postponed [my trip]. I started my career at 17, in Macau. In 1991 I was working for the BBC in London and the Gulf War broke out. I was live all night, and after that, I moved to the evening news. I am not the oldest, but the oldest presenter of the evening news in Europe. [Writing] was never in my horizons. I was doing my first doctoral thesis on war reporting, and the president of the Portuguese Writers Association read the book. He said, “I think you’re a novelist. » He ran a magazine and he asked me to write a short story. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no. So I started writing a short story about East Timor, based on my thesis research. Finally, I dove in, and suddenly I had 200 pages. Afterwards, I was addicted to writing fiction.
I had already worked on China with Immortel. But this time, I went much further to report on the situation of minorities, the return of concentration camps, with millions of people locked up, and plans for expansion. This is not a novel about China, but about the Chinese Communist Party – and it is always important to emphasize this, because the Chinese are the first victims of this regime. Since China is such an important trading partner, we need to understand what’s going on there.
We don’t know much about China’s laogai [re-education through labor camps] because they hide everything and they forget everything. But as Solzhenitsyn said, when we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And this is indeed what is happening in China. Mao had already done it – in a different way, of course, but it is basically the same situation. We need to put an end to this “People’s Republic of Amnesia,” as it is called. […] The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest genocidaire in history; it took between 30 million and 65 million people. There is no person, no organization that has killed as many people as the Party, which remains there and with which we have normal relations. Would we have any dealings with the Nazis? It’s important to understand the issues.
For me, all great works of literature touch on the truth. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert stated a truth hidden in the 19th century, and that is why it became a universal work. In 1984, by George Orwell, it was the first time that anyone showed what the Soviet communist regime was. And it was a shock – he was even isolated, criticized. […] Fiction is also very powerful. It’s one thing to write: there are more than a hundred concentration camps in China with millions of people locked up on ethnic and racial grounds. It’s another thing to see what’s going on with a person. Stalin said: “The death of a person is a tragedy; the death of a million people is a statistic. » And the novel brings us back to the person, to the tragedy. When we tell the story of Madina in The Woman with the Red Dragon, we begin to identify with her and we understand things in a much more powerful way.
I’m an academic; I taught for 25 years at the University of Lisbon, I have two doctorates, so this academic side is always present. I find it important to explain to readers what is not fiction. It helps to understand better and it’s a way to close the novel.
Spinoza was the one who created, with his concessions, liberal democracies. It is said that the father of liberalism is John Locke. But what happened was that John Locke went from England to Amsterdam after Spinoza died; he read all his work, then he went back and wrote down his ideas. But he couldn’t quote him because he was a cursed author, because he said: God is nature, and the Bible is a human creation. A lot of what’s happening today can be found in Spinoza’s life: the questions of religion, the questions of identity that he talked about in the 17th century. So there is a connection because The Woman with the Red Dragon shows us what is happening today, and Spinoza – The Man Who Killed God shows us how our liberal societies were created and are today under attack.
