Granta 169: China

From Nobel Prize-winning writers to debut novelists,
Britain’s most prestigious literary magazine brings you the best in new
writing, photography and art from around the world.

No nation boasts more manufacturing capacity than the
People’s Republic of China, yet few countries’ literary products are less known
in the English-speaking world. Witnesses to the country’s revolutionary
modernisation, China’s writers have experienced historical whiplashes and
sprints forward on an extreme scale. The zhiqing - the
educated youth whom Mao ’sent down’ to the countryside and who experienced a
decade of extreme austerity - are at a vast distance from the generations below
them, who have lived through an epoch of self-assertion and creative dreaming.
In China today, writers across generations look abroad, to new technologies, as
well as to rich veins in the Chinese literary past for new modes of expression.

Granta’s special issue on the writing of contemporary China
collects the mainland’s most thrilling voices. Featuring memoir from Xiao Hai
on moving to Shenzhen at fifteen to work in its factories, reportage from Han
Zhang, who visits the working-class writers carving out a living in Picun, as
well as new fiction from Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, Shuang Xuetao, Zhang
Yueran, Ban Yu, Wang Zhanhei, Zhou Jingzhi, and many more. Poetry by Huang Fan, Lan Lan, Hu Xudong and
Zheng Xiaoqiong. Photography by Feng Li, Haohui Liu, and Li Jie and
Zhang Jungang.

Thomas Meaney is the editor of Granta. He has reported for the New Yorker and Harper’s magazine, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books. In 2022, he received the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism.