Contemporary Chinese Studies
1 total work
In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presentspivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye ofChina's Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressingquestions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt withshifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditionsinspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communistfuture to their readers, even as the present took a very differentturn. Early "red classics" were followed by works featuringincreasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fictionexposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, andsuffering - a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.