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This chapter is about online fiction. It starts with a brief overview of the basic features of genre fiction websites, drawing examples mainly from the highly popular Qidian (Starting Point) site, which is widely believed to have pioneered what is now the most common business model for such sites. The second part of the chapter turns to issues of regulation and transgression, focusing on state attempts to curb what it considers erotic and obscene content. It attempts to understand how this is defined and assessed by looking at examples from the Feilu (Flying Gourd) fiction site, which regularly featured on blacklists published by the state regulator in 2010 and 2011. The third part presents a short case study of the website Heilan (Black and Blue) and its various activities and publications. Black and Blue is the online home of a long-standing avant-garde writing community whose preferred genre is fiction. The chapter also provides further evidence of how Internet literature is moving into new, non-web-based media.

The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the 1950s through the1980s, showing that Chinese socialist culture participated in an imagination of the future shared across the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. Overcoming distinctions between mental and manual labor was central to the Maoist vision of a future society. Various science-related genres considered this issue, especially at moments of intensified utopian aspirations: the Great Leap Forward (late 1950s) and the beginning of the Reform Era (late 1970s and early 1980s). While narratives of the Great Leap Forward glorify physical labor, post-Mao science fiction subverts this hierarchy by associating manual labor with vulgarity, primitive stages of human evolution, and with defective female robots. The laboring body becomes the residue of a technological regime about to be overcome.

This chapter provides a broad overview of popular Chinese literature during the wartime years, including relevant historical context, such as the attempt at reconciliation between different factions and groups of writers in October 1936. Several authors are discussed, including Zhang Henshui, Ping Jinya, Jin Yi, Wang Dulu, Qin Shou’ou, Zhang Ailing, Cheng Xiaoqing, and Yu Qie. It demonstrates that the popular literature of the time was highly diverse and frequently explored aspects of tradition, modernity, nationalism, character psychology and various narrative styles. Tradition and history were freed from being seen as the enemies of progress and were now used for playful entertainment as well as fostering national pride. Overall, the wartime period saw a collapse of the formerly sharp distinction between “new” and “old” literature and this allowed numerous authors to straddle such divides in novel ways.

This chapter on the crime fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray and Cheng Xiaoqing examines the central role of adaptation in the international development of the crime fiction genre in order to present a more complex understanding of the genre’s international connections and mobility. The chapter questions the distinction between original and reproduction that has typically informed critical studies on the genre’s international spread through an analysis of the works of these three writers from Britain, India (Bengal) and China. In demonstrating the ways in which Ray and Cheng adapt what is typically considered an archetypically British genre to their local settings, the chapter deconstructs the preeminent position granted to Holmes as the originator and, instead, draws attention to how Doyle himself adapted the genre in a transnational dialogue with his literary forebears.

This chapter follows on from Chapters 8 and 9, which were devoted to Buddhist and Confucian texts, and applies a similar analysis to a variety of other texts with a focus on those that were subjected to a process of vernacularization. The first genre discussed is that of primers, which initially existed solely to teach the young the elements of Sinitic. Second, medical texts are examined in some depth, for the botanic and linguistic diversity of East Asia necessitated the production of glossaries giving the local names for plants appearing in Chinese pharmacopoeia and later the development of local pharmacopoeia based on locally available plants. Third, conduct books for women are taken up, for the different expectations of women in East Asian societies made Chinese imports unsuitable. Subsequently, a Tang-dynasty manual of statecraft, a manual of forensic medicine, Chinese vernacular fiction, and books about the West are discussed.

The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and writers like Xu Xu and Wumingshi exemplify these trends. They appropriated styles and tropes from earlier modernist writings in Chinese literature, thereby creating hybrid works that were among the most popular of the age. This chapter compares the writers covered in this study in terms of their depiction of modernity, narrative style, representation of the supernatural, and position in the literary field. Overall, the differences are found to outweigh the similarities, but the comparison highlights how various themes were adopted and adapted into popular literature of the 1940s from the New Sensationist writers of the preceding decade, showing their lasting impact.

This chapter examines the comic fantasy, Journey to the West (Xi yu ji) by Wu Cheng-en (c.1506–1582). The novel is crowded with characters and episodes; it features pilgrims who are objects of continual attention while the assorted gods, monsters, and human characters they meet on the road claim only secondary interest. Its author, while building an earlier, simpler version of the story, proves his originality in his subordination of story as such to the larger considerations of theme and character and in his firm comic portrayal of the main pilgrims—Tripitaka, Monkey, and Pigsy. The last two, in particular, are as memorable as another pair of complementary characters famed in world literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. As a satiric fantasy grounded in realistic observation and philosophical wisdom, the Journey does suggest Don Quixote—two works of comparable importance in the respective developments of Chinese and European fiction.