From early times, Chinese culture has taken language, literature, history, morality, governance, and cosmology to be shades on a spectrum and not easily separable. Twentieth-century “literary reportage” (baogaowenxue), despite some foreign influences in its origins, very much continued this Chinese tradition. Its purpose, in the minds of its creators and readers, was to enter the sturm und drang of modern Chinese history – to expose social ills, re-organize society, resist invaders, and so on.

The topic has not been well studied, either in China or the West. Yin-hwa Chou and Thomas Moran have written good dissertations on it, and T.A. Hsia, Paul Pickowicz and others have published insightfully on related areas. But no one has published the full-length study that the field needs, and it is disappointing that Charles Laughlin's new book also falls short.