In October 2015 the Chinese government announced major changes to their population policy, commonly known as the One Child policy. Instead of curbs that limited one-third of Chinese households to strictly one child, Chinese families across the nation could have two children starting from 1 Jan 2016. With incredible timing, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Mei … Continue reading One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Social Experiment – by Mei Fong

What's big and exciting in Chinese literature? We asked Heather Inwood, who always seems to have her finger on the pulse! She's Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, and author of Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes (2014). One of the biggest and most exciting developments in … Continue reading Popular genre fiction in China, from the monkey king to tomb robbing – by Heather Inwood

Frances Wood is the author of several books, including most recently Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War (2016) and her new book Great Books of China: From Ancient Times to the Present (2017). Now retired, she was, for over thirty years, one of the key librarians and curators of the Chinese section of the British Library. … Continue reading Translations in the British Library – by Frances Wood

Nick Stember is a historian and translator of Chinese comics and science fiction. In 2015 he completed a Master of Arts in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His work has been featured in The International Journal of Comic Art, Clarkesworld Magazine, LEAP: The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China, … Continue reading Jia Pingwa as Global Literature – by Nick Stember

In the UK, most literary and translation events take place in London. A few years ago, Frances Weightman and Sarah Dodd, at the University of Leeds, set out to establish Leeds as the centre for new Chinese writing in "the North". Leeds is a city about halfway between London and Scotland (the train from London takes … Continue reading Creating a dynamic new centre for Chinese literature in translation – by Frances Weightman

China's domestic literary prizes are often viewed with uncertainty from abroad: Who runs them? Are they trustworthy? How are the different prizes specialized? Which should we be paying attention to? We asked Chen Dongmei, who usually exerts her influence behind the scenes at Paper Republic, to step forward and give us a rundown of prizes … Continue reading Chinese Literature Prizes – by Chen Dongmei

The People's Republic of China has a population of over 1.38 billion. About 90% of the population is ethnically Han-Chinese, which means that about 10% of the population belong to ethnic minorities. That's over 138 million people! We invited Bruce Humes to tell us more about these people and their literature. This post is in two … Continue reading Ethnic-themed Literature out of China – by Bruce Humes

This piece is by Nicky Harman of Paper Republic: Many libraries stock both books and films – a good film can encourage people to read the book, and vice versa, and it can be very interesting to compare a book with its film, to identify the changes and to understand the reasons behind them. For … Continue reading Reincarnations: Chinese novels translated into English and into film – by Nicky Harman

Think about Beijing - what’s the first thought that comes to mind? Whether it’s politics, history, business, people, culture, smog, Olympics, Tian’anmen Square, university, food – our associations and experiences of a place are often associated with particular people at a particular time. The Chinese equivalent of Zeitgeist is shidai jingshen (literally, spirit of the age). And, … Continue reading A mesmerised youth in the grip of the evolving capital: Feng Tang’s novel Beijing, Beijing – by Martina Codeluppi

Chen Zijin’s novel The Untouched Crime, translated by Michelle Deeter, was published last year by AmazonCrossing. You can find readers’ comments on the amazon website, and if you scroll down the amazon.co.uk page, you can see that AmazonCrossing made this book available to reviewers on Netgalley. But who better to tell us about the book than … Continue reading The Untouched Crime by Zijin Chen – by Michelle Deeter