Where is China’s Balzac?
China’s economic renaissance and renewed cultural confidence have not yet been matched by a creative re-awakening. So argues this review essay, which considers the comparative globalisation of ‘Eng Lit,’ departing from an unpretentious detective story set in Shanghai. ‘Death of A Red Heroine’ by Qiu Xiaolong Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2000, 465 pp. This engaging and readable crime novel, set in Shanghai in 1990, gives more human and humane insight into post-Maoist China than half a dozen volumes of foreign punditry. And quite right too: isn’t that what literature is for—to illuminate life in ways that only the artist does? Qiu’s basic approach is familiar from Hollywood: a principled cop, trying to unravel a sleazy and difficult case, is under bureaucratic and political pressure from his leaders. In Western treatments the ‘political’ dimension is usually to do with a mayoral election or the discovery of graft higher up the command chain; here, it is of course the Communist Party syste
