Mardi McConnochie's response to Leslie T. Chang's article "Working Titles - What do the most industrious people on earth read for fun? (New Yorker, 6 Feb 2012)

To a Western reader, these plots and concerns seem mundane, and not the stuff of fiction. But as Chang points out, the competitive workplace is a new thing for the Chinese...

These novels are doing what the novel has always done: offered advice and instruction on how to function in an area of society which is new and frightening, opening up to a terrible new kind of mobility, advising on pitfalls and opportunities. A massive cultural change is taking place in China, and this new fiction – enabled, as Chang describes, by changes to the Chinese publishing industry – is helping Chinese workers to understand and navigate that change, using techniques drawn from both fiction and the self-help manual...