``Wolf Totem,'' China's newest literary export, features blood-and-guts-spewing battles, praying Mongolians and a leading character named Little Wolf.It details ecological ruin and slams the Han-Chinese mentality as sheep-like. Four years after its publication in Chinese, the book is still a bestseller in the country. Author Jiang Rong, whose real name is Lu Jiamin, says the book's message, distilled from his years herding sheep in Inner Mongolia during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, remains relevant today.``If you have sheep spirit, you won't survive,'' said Jiang, in an interview at a Beijing teahouse. ``Traditional Chinese culture would like to turn people into obedient sheep.''Through protagonist Chen Zhen, a Beijing student, Jiang describes his decade with wolf-worshipping Mongolian nomads. In the book, Chen is outwitted by wolves, narrowly escapes them and sees their savvy slaughter of gazelles, stallions and his sheep.Mixing autobiography, liberal theories, adventure, character study and ethnology, ``Wolf Totem'' has sold more than 2 million legal copies in China, and perhaps 20 million pirated ones.An English edition, published by Penguin Group and translated by Howard Goldblatt, was released worldwide on March 31. Goldblatt won a 1999 American Translators Association award for his work on Taiwanese author Chu Tien-wen's ``Notes of a Desolate Man.'' In November, ``Wolf Totem'' won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, a sister of the Booker Prize.GutsIn China, the book is considered a novel and self-help guide in one. Chinese students, CEOs, and soldiers have resolved to mimic wolves' resourcefulness, self-determination, teamwork and strategic combat, said Jiang.Like many Westerners, Mongolian nomads (and wolves) lived on brutish struggle, guts and personal liberty, said Jiang. Wolf- hating Hans are docile, their Confucian and agrarian heritage breeds deference to hierarchy, order and autocratic power, he said.That helps explains how Genghis and Kublai Khan conquered the Han, China's majority race, he said.``You Chinese have the courage of sheep,'' Mongolian herdsman Bilgee tells Chen in the book. ``We Mongols are meat- eating wolves.'' Wolves live for autonomy. Chen raises a cub, Little Wolf, which later dies because it isn't free.Jiang said he's surprised his book wasn't censored, although that's probably because he couched Chen's insights as cultural- philosophical, not political. That ``Wolf Totem'' isn't banned suggests ``elements of freedom are growing,'' said Jiang, in all- black attire and blocky, oversized glasses.Even with his Chinese publisher, Jiang was secretive about his identity, revealing it only last year to enter the Man Asian competition. He prefers his pseudonym and declines most interviews, especially with domestic media.Wounded ParentsHis upbringing, in Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing, was ``abnormal,'' said the author. His parents, wounded while fighting invading Japanese troops, became government administrators after the Communist Party took power in 1949.His mother ``disliked staying at home,'' said Jiang. She bought him Western novels, took him to foreign movies and on weekend trips. His father let him read foreign news reports distributed only to party cadres.When the Cultural Revolution erupted, Jiang joined the leftist Red Guards because ``everyone did.'' Still, he realized soon enough they were ``ignorant'' and ``read only Mao quotes.''To escape Beijing, Jiang volunteered for the grassland rather than a military camp, hoping his two trunks of books -- including ``Jane Eyre'' and ``Call of the Wild'' -- wouldn't be confiscated.ImprisonedJiang's herding was interrupted when he was imprisoned for three years for criticizing Lin Biao, Mao's presumed successor, in his diary. A graduate student of politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1979, he co-founded ``Beijing Spring,'' a progressive journal.In 1989, he led colleagues and students at the China Institute of Industrial Relations to Tiananmen Square's pro- democracy demonstrations. He was arrested and, after 18 months in jail, released and demoted to a library clerk.Writing ``Wolf Totem'' took six years. Fans are flocking to the novel's Swan Lake and other spots. Jiang has visited Inner Mongolia recently but not his old haunts.As in the novel, Beijing ordered the wolves exterminated, the grassland tamed into farmland; the fearlessness and speed of Mongolian horses soon regressed. Now, every spring, sandstorms from Inner Mongolia suffocate Beijing. The book depicts new generations of Mongolians as materialistic and environmentally weak, who kill wildlife for kicks.``It's sad to see the grassland destroyed,'' said Jiang.While Jiang says China's politics are still not open enough, he hesitates to campaign for freedom in one of the world's ``least liberal countries.'' The writer said he's ``worn out,'' physically and psychologically, from book-writing and persecution.``But wolves won't be subjugated, even if they die.''