Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Below is a review by Linda Jaivin of the recently published English translation of Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize. The review was first published in The Australian Literary Review, on May 7, 2008, and is republished here with their permission, together with an introduction written for this website by Geremie R. Barmé.

You might also want to listen to a much more positive review of the book from NPR, or read Jonathan Mirsky's review in which he says "Wolf Totem is the best Chinese book I've read for many years and the only really good novel." You can buy the book on Amazon.

Linda Jaivin’s review of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem is a timely intervention on a subject that has been a hot China topic in the international media. Again, it is one that touches on the issues of non-Han ethnic cultures, this time dealing with a novel the author of which finds succour in what writers like Rae Yang (see her memoir Spider Eaters) and Yuan Weishi (the Zhongshan University historian attacked in early 2006) have called “wolves’ milk” (langnai). That is, the atavistic politics of passion and rhetorical violence fostered by ideologues, media carpet-baggers and the “engineers of human souls” in the guise of supporting righteous patriotic fervour.

Wolves in chic clothing have been around for most of the “open door and reform period”, an era that marks its thirtieth anniversary this year. Indeed, contemporary Chinese cultural producers have been making a meal of borderland themes and peoples to express cutting-edge artistic and ideological views since the 1980s. Some writers and artists have sought in various borderland ethnic Others an invigorating tonic replete with the essence of the masculine, the swarthy and the heroic, one they hope can infuse the peoples of the Central Plains (Zhong Yuan) with greater vigour and militancy (and make them a buck and a name in the process).