From Bloomberg:
Reading the jacket blurb on the English version of Jiang Rong‘s “Wolf Totem,” you might mistake the book for a call-of-the-wild documentary perfectly suited to animal-loving adolescents.
Yet its bucolic idyll is far from the whole story. A Chinese bestseller, “Wolf Totem” also presents a seductive statement about China’s global destiny. If Western politicians, military brass and Wall Street operators want to know where China is heading, they would do well to read this winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize.
Set during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), “Wolf Totem” tells the story of Chen Zhen, a young Beijing intellectual who volunteers to herd sheep in China’s Inner Mongolia. This mirrors the life of the author, a retired sociology professor who himself spent those years laboring with native nomads.
