…Something momentous has just happened: Penguin Modern Classics has for the first time allowed a work of 20th-century Chinese fiction on to its list. After skulking for decades in small, academic or, more disastrously, communist Chinese presses (the threadbare Panda Books), translated fiction from China has, 50 years after a similar gesture transformed Japanese fiction’s profile in the west, been beckoned into Penguin’s modern canon. Modern Chinese fiction, long regarded at best as an educational source of information on China, or at worst, providing none at all looks to have made a great leap towards the bookshelves of British readers.