Best Chinese Stories: 1949-1989

This is an anthology of short fiction created during the first forty years of the People’s Republic of China. In these decades the poverties and triumphs of Chinese literature is profoundly reflected; literature emerged as a political tool and artists and intellectuals were ostracized. Any deviation from the path of national progress was swept aside. By April 1976, on the eve of the fall of the Cultural Revolution, a great many poems appeared at Tiananmen Square. This was a spontaneous eruption of curses, criticisms and rebellion against the rule of the “Gang of Four” who had had but stamped out China’s literary flame. This volume follows the new directions in Chinese literature in the post-Mao era, when writers began to study the law of literature existing quite apart from its relations with politics. They began to expand its boundaries, searching for new techniques of expression and effects. Contained in this anthology are works by minor and major figures in the Chinese literary canon, including Wang Meng, Wang Anyi, Zhang Jie, Feng Jicai, and many others.