Yu Hua

Author of China in Ten Words, the essay collection Kyle read for its frame on Chinese collective experience. Yu Hua’s central thread — “In America it feels like we have lost our sense of ‘the people’” — reads China’s shared identity as a comparison highlighting what the US has lost. He anchors the “we survive in adversity” idea in Mencius (the Confucian philosopher, see Confucius) and traces China’s thirty-year transformation from a country “ruled by politics” into one “where money is king,” touching grassroots Entrepreneurship (the “Garbage King”), the copycat “shanzhai” Innovation phenomenon, the Cultural Revolution’s “reading famine,” and his own answer to how one becomes a writer: “By writing.”

Context: Yu Hua (b. 1960) is a Chinese novelist associated with the avant-garde fiction of the late 1980s, best known for the novels To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and Brothers; China in Ten Words (2011) is a nonfiction essay collection structured around ten keywords.

Where this appears

• China in Ten Words — the authored work; Kyle reads it through frames on the loss of “the people,” post-Tiananmen development, and the Mencian view that progress comes through correcting error.