The few Chinese novels that make it onto foreign bookshelves in translation almost always fit into an outsider’s idea of what Chinese fiction “should” be: anti-government, anti-authoritarian, and pro-democracy. In The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters, journalist Megan Walsh demonstrates that such “banned in China” books represent only a minuscule segment of the Chinese writing landscape. In six brisk chapters, Walsh surveys what Chinese audiences are actually reading and shows that it’s not so different from what’s popular elsewhere.

Walsh begins with the writers that foreign readers have likely already heard of—novelists Yan Lianke and Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan—but soon leaves behind this stable ground for new terrain. She introduces the works of commercial fiction writers and those plying their trade on the internet, churning out never-ending sagas in return for clicks and compensation. Genre fiction makes an appearance in chapters on detective stories and science fiction. While Walsh argues that works in these genres always emerge from a uniquely Chinese writing environment, her point is clear: Chinese readers are, in the end, readers. If a broader sweep of literature were translated, outside audiences would have a better sense of the incredible variety of books, short stories, serialized novels, and graphic novels that populate the Chinese literary world.

The Subplot is a jumping-off point for readers who want a general overview and might then independently pursue one or two of the topics discussed in greater depth. Walsh provides a helpful further reading section at the end, giving her readers guidance as they embark on their own exploration of contemporary Chinese literature beyond the genre of “banned in China” books.

A very interesting book. Insightful and illuminating, it offers an original and new way of looking at China today — the author provides plenty of context, history, and observations. Definitely recommended for anyone looking for something a little different about Chinese culture and society.

It was an interesting book and I feel like I learned a lot. However I wasn’t as into it as I hope do would be but I would recommend it if this topic is the kind of thing that interests you.

A marvellous introduction to and overview of contemporary Chinese writing and publishing, an environment in which Chinese writers have to work under constant surveillance and censorship, and in which many have turned to internet publishing as a creative space that is largely free of control and where they can up to a point avoid official censorship. Beijing continues to jail writers for expressing forbidden ideas and thus many have become increasingly inventive, even if this sometimes means writing vast sagas in instalments, epic works that sometimes are more than 6 million words long. Some writers churn out up to 30,000 words a day – for comparison The Great Gatsby is a mere 47,000 words. Traditional formal publishing still exists but the online world allows writers to bypass the traditional gatekeepers, and the sheer size of the novels found online makes it harder for the algorithms to search them for forbidden topics. Understanding a country’s literature is an essential part of understanding the country itself and this accessible and eminently readable exploration of the subject is a wonderful glimpse into Chinese writing today, and offers many suggestions of what to read next to delve further into Chinese literature.

This was a really fascinating and (too)brief survey of contemporary Chinese literature, it's major themes and movements, and how authors have variously dealt with living under a censorious government. Lots of authors to dive into, and I really appreciated the discussion of the historical trends (as well as learning that generations are described by their birth decade. It's somewhat odd but no stranger than boomers versus gen x versus millennials). I also was impressed by how Walsh explored both the traditional print trends including the recent rise of SF) and the internet-driven literature (and how the government has a hate-love-hate relationship with those platforms and slash-style stories in particular). A really good introduction that makes me want to explore more.

What can we learn from the state of Chinese fiction? This seemingly bizarre question is the subject of The Subplot, another in the superlative series of short books from Columbia Global Reports. Megan Walsh has read an amazing amount of Chinese fiction and has researched the background of both the authors and the circumstances. The results are most revealing. China, shall we says, thinks different.

In China, it used to be that if you wrote good poetry, you could get a good civil service career. Today, writing is one of riskiest paths anyone can take. The omnipotent Xi Jinping set the stage for extreme caution when he announced in 2014 that: "Modern art and literature needs to take patriotism as its muse, guiding the people to establish and adhere to correct views of history, the nation, the country, and culture." This would have sucked all the air out of the room anywhere else, but Chairman Mao had already colored in that box decades earlier. Walsh says: "Mao placed a blanket ban on all genre fiction because, naturally, there was no crime in socialist China, no need for fantasy when society defers to science, and no use for romance when one loved the Party above all else."

This stifling diktat has of course crippled nonfiction, which must bend and twist to meet the demands of patriotism first, but for fiction it has inspired creative workarounds - until they become too popular.

So China's literary scene has developed differently. A third of printed books are self-help, compared to 6% in the USA. Fiction makes up just 7%, but a lot of important factual work ends up there. Walsh says nonfiction authors can be found publishing novels, because if they published their findings as fact, their books could be censored or banned, and they could be canceled from publishing or from their day jobs. Bans from working or participating in all media loom over everyone. So symbolism and substitutions figure significantly in Chinese novels.

And still there is risk. This is because there are no laws, just diktat. Authors have to guess the flavor of the hour when they put words to paper. She cites one author who wrote about corruption, figuring his book would be dead on arrival, censored into nothing. But exactly the opposite happened; the censors didn't cut a word. He had hit a brand new sweet spot because President Xi had just begun his campaign to oust the most flagrant of the corrupt from their positions (outside his own family). So it was more than okay for someone to expose the depths of it. It was actually desirable.

But for every result like that, there are many more where writers might even be jailed for writing that does not demonstrate correct thinking. Especially if they are successful. Walsh says "Controversial topics are generally overlooked by the government as long as they don't sell. But draconian punishment for the most successful transgressors is a commonplace tactic."

Asking for it would include writing about the border territories of the Uyghurs and other ethnicities. China's reading habits are not allowed to include those who are not Han Chinese, unless they express joy for what the country and the party have done for them. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tiananmen - best not to go there if you want to survive as a writer. Even bookstore owners have been disappeared over them.

Going round the censors by publishing overseas doesn't necessarily work either. It will still get authors canceled at home, and their intended audience in China will likely have no access to those books at all.

It's the biggest single books market in the world. So what do the Chinese read?

There is a very lively online e-book scene, like soap operas in print, where books go on for hundreds of chapters, and authors grind out anywhere from 2000 to 20,000 words (100 pages) a day to keep up with demand. They have produced celebrity writers, film and tv tie-ins, and little of lasting value.

Uniquely to China, there is a fashion online for boy-boy romance novels and comics, written by girls. Apparently they must be written by girls to qualify. Girls know these things best.

In a chapter on whodunnits, Walsh finds even in this normally harmless pabulum for the masses, authors do not and cannot know where the line is. If a private detective makes police look bad, is that over the line? Under Mao, she says, "crime fiction vanished. Given that crime was clearly the product of unjust bourgeois and capitalist societies, it was irrelevant to Mao's law-abiding socialist society." Today it is available, but it seems strained.

The line is constantly shifting, without notice or process as government reshapes history and implements new policy. She says government expends enormous amounts to erase the past as it actually was, replacing it with the China Dream history, in order to focus on the future. Where they intersect, in the present, is a gamble for any writer.

Walsh describes numerous books from the rich sci-fi sector, where there might be some level of safety for writers. As in any culture, there is a huge number of people writing, and she does her best to feature at least the prominent. She even taps into the new nostalgia rage for back to basics- an unrealistic longing for the villages "that urbanites have never visited." Where life was simple and satisfying. This of course suffers from the erasure of history like nothing else does. It neatly forgets the poverty, hardship, famine, the terror and tortures of the Cultural Revolution and the Hundred Days Flowering, the melting of all metal tools and utensils in backyard furnaces, to make patriotic "steel". It's what drove millions to the cities, even though they weren't legally allowed to settle there and lived without any of the rights of residents.

This is not a criticism of China. Nostalgia is no different anywhere it festers, including in the USA with its Make America Great Again.

Chinese writers quite naturally run the gamut of styles and genres, filling in gaps wherever they find them. I confess I have only reviewed one of them, a book of essays by Han Han, who took his youthful winnings in the writing game and plowed them into car racing.

Walsh covers the bases, and points out all these political twists and turns, but she hasn't made the book about them. Reading it familiarizes the reader with important names in Chinese literature, their successes, their fears and their innovations just to pursue their craft. The outside pressures, as the title suggests, are but The Subplot.

David Wineberg

A really interesting read, and I definitely feel like I learned a lot. Walsh does a great job of giving quick background context to each of the different types of books she describes, though you can definitely tell when one of the genres (or sub-genres) is one she's less familiar with (usually because that section will lack quotes from a sample book). I think anyone interested in learning more about China's current literary landscape - or anyone looking to add off the beaten trail reads to their TBR - will find this enjoyable.

The Subplot, by Megan Walsh, is a fascinating survey of modern Chinese literature, particularly fiction. In each chapter, Walsh looks at a different theme of literature and the limitations and forces that shape it, from incredibly verbose online fiction to the struggles of writing crime fiction in a society with ‘zero’ unsolved crime. While I am sure having a more in depth knowledge of China’s politics and society would have only added to my appreciation of this book, even with my very basic knowledge I was able to understand and enjoy the discussion. Reading The Subplot will certainly add several Chinese authors to your TBR pile.

A generation raised under Maoist principles struggles to find meaning in a forward-looking consumerist society. Novelistic accounts of decadence share a literary landscape with the sparse, direct poetry of exploited factory workers. In digital factories, the authors of online fiction produce text at an industrial scale, competing for the likes, shares, and attention of their readers. On the social margins, straight women pen the romances of gay men and Han Chinese authors romanticize the perceived self-sufficiency of Mongalian nomads. In a local spin on the whodunnit, authors align their detective fiction with the official realities of a country in which every murder case is reportedly solved. Writers respond to rapid industrialization, whether by drawing on historical themes of communion with nature or by imagining future lives in which humans themselves are automated.
These are the subplots of The Subplot, Megan Walsh’s survey of the forces, concerns, and ideas that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Chinese literature. The Subplot’s promise is held in its title: this concise, detailed survey introduces its readers to the liminalities, the modes between “criticism and complicity,” that have given form to contemporary Chinese literature. Before addressing these conditions directly, Walsh addresses a bias she has identified among reviewers outside of China: that in order for Chinese literature to merit attention and evade accusations of authoritarian complicity, it must be “banned in China,” an overt subversion or critique of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Walsh demonstrates, however, that while censorship is one of the forces shaping contemporary Chinese literature, it is by no means the only force. That the forces are multiple, but also generative because of their restrictions, weaves throughout the work as its throughline. In some cases, dictates—whether imposed by a censorious government, demanded by a hyper-engaged readership, or internalized by pragmatic authors—have given rise to particular literary forms. In other cases, however, censorship is a peripheral concern, and writers, like anywhere in the world, engage with the realities that encompass them (and often not in ways that please officials).
Generally speaking, the chapters are thematically organized: historical memory (and its correlate, historical amnesia), realist fiction, responses to technological advancement, and so on. The wordplay of the first chapter, Lost Causes, struck me as ingenious: the causes in question refer not only to political causes, but the literal causal factors that have been erased from official memory, unmooring those whose personal experience of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution has all but disappeared from contemporary recollection. Some of the themes feel less cohesive, however, such as the grouping into a single chapter of homoerotic romances penned by straight women (danmei) and ethnic minority literature. Perhaps neither filled an entire chapter, so together they went.
As an uninitiated reader, The Subplot was an excellent overview of contemporary Chinese literature. I have cursory knowledge of contemporary Chinese history, but a deeper familiarity with China would help readers (myself included) better grasp the significance of certain arguments. For example, understanding how older people have responded to lost causalities in the post-Mao era was challenging without an explanation as to how official historiography has dealt with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. That’s on me to explore later, alongside some of the authors Walsh has compellingly made a case for in The Subplot.