During the first thirty years under communism, China completely banned
crime fiction. After Mao, however, crime genres of all kinds--old and
new, Chinese and Western--sprang up in profusion. Crime narrative again
became one of the most prolific and best-loved forms of Chinese popular
culture, and it often embodied the Chinese people's most trenchant and
open critiques of their newly restored socialist legal system.
This is the first full-length study in any language of Chinese crime
fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the
first book to apply legal scholars' "law and literature" inquiry to the
rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture. Familiar Holmesian,
quintessentially Chinese, and bizarre East-West hybrids of plots,
crimes, detectives, judges, suspects, and ideas of law and corruption
emerge from the pages of China's new crime fiction, which is alternately
embraced and condemned by the Chinese establishment as it lurches
uncertainly toward post-communist society.
Informed by contemporary comparative and theoretical perspectives on
popular culture and the fiction of crime and detection, this book is
based on extensive readings of Chinese crime fiction and interviews--in
China and abroad--with the communist regime's exiled and still-in-power
security and judicial officers. It was in the Orwellian year of 1984
that the authorities set out to control China's crime fiction and even
to manufacture it themselves--only to find that fiction, like the social
phenomena it depicts, seems destined to remain one step ahead of the
law.
