Word: china
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...rights to Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, a coming-of-age tale set in Inner Mongolia. It was a record sum for a Chinese novel. In 2008, the same publishing house issued, amid much brouhaha, Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars, a lively look at the dark side of China's boom. And it has just announced plans to bring more Chinese writers to the attention of international readers by expanding its Beijing operations...
...stories in the Penguin collection. Jiang Rong readily admits, for example, that Wolf Totem was inspired in part by Lu Xun's writings. And though Zhu Wen denies this kind of link, Lovell, who has translated both writers, argues persuasively that in Zhu's stories of 1990s China we see an "obsession with a heartlessly congested society that seems to have trickled directly down from...
...think, as I do, that the country's growing global profile should be matched by greater awareness of its cultural offerings. But to me the best news of all is the recent publication, as a Penguin Classic, of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China. It's a work that has nothing to do with introducing an up-and-coming writer, but rather seeks to widen appreciation of the long-dead Lu Xun - the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1936 at the age of 55. (Read "China's Troubled Coming...
...England's George Orwell is another essential writer, and one with whom Lu Xun shares important traits. Each introduced new terms into the political lexicon: Ah-Q-ism (a proclivity for self-delusion) is as readily understood in China as references to Big Brother are elsewhere. Each author spent most of his adult life as an independent thinker of the left, criticizing dogmatism and hypocrisy wherever it appeared on the political spectrum. Each championed plain forms of writing. And each penned an ironic novella about a revolution that claimed to be about changing everything, but ended up altering only...
...Perhaps the most interesting Orwell - Lu Xun parallel concerns 1989's Tiananmen crisis. Audiences outside China, appalled by the government's use of lethal force against the students and the cynical cover-up campaign that followed, found it natural to criticize the Orwellian behavior of China's leadership. In China, it was just as natural for critics of the government to voice their outrage via quotations from Lu Xun's famous essay on the slayings of 1926 - allusions that all educated Chinese recognized as a potent way of saying that the current regime was little better than the hated warlords...