He held clandestine exhibitions of his paintings in his one-room shack in Nanxiao Lane, which became a meeting point for dissident artists and writers of Beijing.

He wrote Bardo, a novel about two doomed lovers who are reincarnated through Chinese history, and The Nine Crossroads, about a group of sent-down youth who are sent to a remote mountain inhabited by a primitive tribe.

After the Handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Ma Jian moved to Germany to take up a post teaching Chinese literature at Ruhr University, and to work on Beijing Coma, a novel about the Tiananmen massacre and the decade of political repression and economic growth that followed it.

[4] In 1999, he moved to London and wrote Red Dust, a fictionalised account of his journey through China in the 1980s, which won the 2002 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

In 2008–2009, he travelled extensively through the remote interior of China to research The Dark Road, a novel that explores the One Child Policy, published by Chatto & Windus and Penguin in 2013.

[5] Despite the restrictions placed on him, Ma Jian has become a leading Chinese writer, internationally distinguished with his works translated into a great number of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Japanese, Dutch, Hebrew, Romanian, Turkish, Greek, Polish, Korean, Italian and Portuguese.

Many related this with the recent Victor Mallet visa controversy and the cancellation of Badiucao's exhibition, complaining that China was covertly silencing critics in the autonomous territory and curbing her autonomy.

Their most remarked-upon feature is that traditional Tibetan culture is not idealised, but rather depicted as harsh and often inhuman; one reviewer noted that the "stories sketch multi-generational incest, routine sexual abuse and ritual rape".