Most of the media's attention is trained on the Olympics in Beijing, but China has become an increasingly muscular player in the global literary competition. A translation of Jiang Rong's "Wolf Totem" recently garnered a major award and the number of new books from China is growing, led by translations of fiction from such acclaimed writers as Su Tong, Ma Jian, and Yu Hua.
Which Chinese writers, whose works are available in English, are the best?
Which are overrated? Do you agree with critics who charge that the Chinese authors who are admired in the West kowtow to Western artistic standards and consciously export homogenized (or out-of-date) images of their homeland for world consumption?
