China's epic transformation over the past four decades has seen cities expand, fortunes rise, and expectations change. It has left Chinese people to either ride the waves of change, or scramble -- perhaps struggle -- to keep up.

In the midst of it all, Chinese fiction has reflected and riffed on life on the ground, with humor, satire, pathos, and good old-fashioned story-telling. At times in the Reform and Opening Up era, Chinese fiction has even driven a national conversation.

This episode offers a conversation on all of this with two deeply knowledgeable guests:

Jianying Zha is a contributor to The New Yorker, and the critically acclaimed author of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and  Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture (1996), Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (2011), and other books and writing, both fiction and non-fiction, in both English and Chinese. Jianying was born and raised in Beijing, where she studied Chinese literature before moving to the United States in the early 1980s to study English literature. She has, in most of the years since, split time between China and the United States.

Perry Link is a deeply respected expert in Chinese language and literature,  Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University.  His books include Stubborn Weeds: Popular and Controversial Chinese Literature After the Cultural Revolution (Chinese Literature in Translation)  (1984), Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (1992), The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (2000),  An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (2013), and I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo (2023). 

The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.