A retired Chinese university lecturer who has hidden behind a pen name to ensure his provocative bestselling novel “Wolf Totem” does not provoke the authorities is the first winner of Asia’s equivalent of the Man Booker Prize.

The epic “Wolf Totem” — part memoir, part historical treatise, part ecological tract — was chosen for the Man Asia Literary Prize from a final shortlist of five books by Asian authors.

Adrienne Clarkson, heading the panel of three judges, described the novel about life on the Mongolian grasslands during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution as panoramic. “This masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture. A book like no other. Memorable.”

The novel has been a huge hit in China since its publication in 2004. The publisher began with a print run of 20,000 - fairly modest by Chinese standards - and has since sold about two million books. Another 20 million pirated copies are estimated to have sold - for a much lower price and without royalties to the author - on China’s vibrant underground market.

But the 61-year-old writer, who goes by the pseudonym Jiang Rong, said he was only slightly surprised at the enormous popularity of a book that was a result of 30 years of thought and six years of writing.

He told The Times: “This is a book that is in praise of freedom and the environment. It is a book that came at a time when Chinese people were looking for answers to the needs of the spirit. This is not an abstract theory but the tale of the strength of the wolf.”

The book has been debated at length on television talkshows, distributed by company executives as a motivational tool and even used by officers in the Chinese military as a guide on the lupine skills to subdue one’s prey.

One reason for its success is one that Mr Jiang is reluctant to discuss - his anonymity. The photograph of himself - bespectacled and wearing the nondescript grayish jersey and jacket favoured by China’s intellectuals - that he provided for the prize shortlist was the first he has handed out voluntarily.

But the media-shy Mr Jiang may soon lose the last shreds of his anonymity. Penguin bought the rights to “Wolf Totem” for $100,000 and expects to publish the book in Britain in March.

Other Chinese intellectuals have debated the merits of “Wolf Totem” and its author in their blogs, using his real name of Lu Jiamin. Lu Jiamin, a retired political science lecturer, was a graduate of the prestigious Research Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and an editor of Beijing Spring, an unofficial publication that appeared during the Democracy Wall movement, a brief flowering of free expression in 1978-79.

China’s propaganda czars may not have allowed - let alone encouraged - a novel written under the real name of a man who spent time in jail for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

The secrecy surrounding Mr Jiang’s real identity, coupled with praise for the book from China’s top propaganda official, meant that all sides could keep face and the book could still sell with an official imprimatur.

Mr Jiang himself says he regards the book as an allegory of the importance of freedom in a society and warns that without real freedom autocratic governments can spark wars. He once said: “If the people become wolves, and demand reform from their government, they will be less of a threat to the world.”

The book is based on his experiences after he responded to a 1967 call from Chairman Mao and volunteered to go to Inner Mongolia where he spent 11 years herding sheep. It was the germ of the idea for his tale of wolves and sheep, nomads and environmental degradation.

Critics see the novel as a social critique of the Chinese people - likened by the author likens in some ways to sheep, passive and easily controlled. The spirit of the wolves, in contrast, is of survival, loyalty, bravery and sacrifice.

Mr Jiang told The Times: “I could not have published this book 20 years ago. That shows that China has created more freedoms but the process is not yet complete.”

WOLF TOTEM

The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen, who volunteers to move to a remote nomadic settlement on the Chinese-Mongolian border and discovers a life of simplicity based on an eternal struggle between wolves and humans in their fight to survive.

He adopts a wolf cub and begins to study the lives of the nomads with whom he lives and the wolves who share their land. The balance between the wolves and humans is disrupted by people from the city, who bring modernity and a drive for productivity to the remote grasslands and in doing so damage the region.

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