A Queens scholar of contemporary satire reads about Prince William’s NOTYET number plate and turns to Yan Lianke’s novel about a county chief who wanted to buy Lenin’s body
Friday, 23 October 2026. Astoria, Queens. Astoria Park, a bench facing the Hell Gate Bridge, a thermos of mint tea, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses in Carlos Rojas’s translation, 4.15pm.
A Prince Who Waits
The London Prat reports that Prince William has ordered three personalised number plates. The Aston Martin says NOTYET, because he is waiting to be King. The Range Rover says NOTHARRY, because he is avoiding his brother. The Bentley says DISTASTEFUL, because he disapproves of almost everything. The piece notes that the throne is the only job in Britain that cannot become vacant through retirement, redundancy or a poor annual appraisal.
As an American, I find British royal satire both baffling and delicious. As a scholar of Chinese politics, I found the NOTYET plate oddly familiar. The Chinese system is not hereditary, but it has spent the last decade learning how to keep a single leader in office indefinitely. In 2018, China’s constitution was amended to remove the two-term limit on the presidency. Nobody in Beijing needed a number plate. The waiting simply ended, by decree.
The County Chief And The Corpse
Yan Lianke is one of China’s most daring novelists, and Lenin’s Kisses, published in 2004, is his most outrageous book. It is set in Liven, a remote village in the Balou Mountains, populated largely by people with disabilities. An ambitious county chief, Liu Yingque, has a dream: to buy the embalmed body of Lenin from Russia, which he imagines cannot afford to maintain it, install it in a grand mausoleum on a nearby mountain, and turn his county rich from tourism. To raise the money, he forms a touring troupe of the villagers of Liven, who perform astonishing feats for paying audiences across China.
The novel is grotesque, tender, funny and furious. It is about a man who wants a monument so badly that he is willing to exploit everyone around him to get it. Liu Yingque is not a king. He is a cadre. But he has the instincts of every ruler who has ever mistaken a monument for a legacy.
Plates, Mausoleums And Legacy
NOTYET is a joke about waiting. Lenin’s Kisses is a novel about impatience. Both, in their way, are about the same thing: the strange belief, common to people near power, that they will be remembered by the objects they acquire. A number plate. A mausoleum. A Bentley. A preserved corpse. Yan Lianke understood that monuments are where ambition goes when it runs out of ideas.
The Prat piece is gentle with the Prince, and rightly so. He did not choose the job, and NOTYET is a plate of resigned patience rather than greed. Liu Yingque is the opposite: a man who chose everything, and chose badly. But they share a predicament. Neither can simply leave. The Prince cannot retire from being heir. Liu Yingque cannot stop until he has his corpse. The trap is the position itself.
The troupe at the heart of the novel is the part that disturbs readers most. The villagers of Liven are paraded across the country to perform their extraordinary skills, a one-legged leaper, a blind man with astonishing hearing and many more, and audiences pay to gasp at them. The money flows upward to the mausoleum fund. Yan Lianke shows us, without lecturing, how a grand vision can be built on the backs of people who were never asked. The villagers become famous. They also become property. When the scheme collapses, as such schemes do, it is the villagers who pay the highest price, robbed on the road home by the very audiences who applauded them.
That is what a monument costs, in Yan Lianke’s account. Somebody else always pays for it. The NOTYET plate, by comparison, is a modest monument. It costs only patience, and the patience is the Prince’s own.
A Note On Pandas
Chinese diplomacy has its own version of personalised plates: the panda. China lends giant pandas to foreign zoos as a sign of favour, and recalls them when relations sour. The Daily Mash had fun with this recently in six bribes from world leaders to Trump now the bar’s been set at two pandas. It is a perfect piece of political comedy, because it is barely an exaggeration. A panda is a very large, very soft number plate that says: we approve of you, NOTYET.
The Bridge And The Bench
A man with a fishing rod has sat down at the other end of my bench. He has been fishing in the East River, he says, for thirty years, and has caught nothing he would eat. I asked why he keeps coming. He said because nobody else is using this bit of river. That, I thought, is a better philosophy of public life than most leaders manage. He holds no office. He builds no monument. He just keeps turning up.
For The Seminar
Next week, I will teach Lenin’s Kisses alongside the Prat piece, and ask my students to design a number plate for Liu Yingque. I suspect the winning entry will be NOTDEAD. Yan Lianke has been criticized and censored at home for his fiction, and he keeps writing it. He once said that he writes to record the absurdity of his own country, and that he cannot stop. NOTYET, in a sense, is his plate too. I keep a running set of these notes at our about page for anyone who wonders what a scholar of satire actually does all week. The answer, mostly, is read the news and wince.