I enjoy reading new and 20th century fiction from mainland China. I read Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, and Ha Jin among others whenever their books come into translation, so Megan Walsh's book "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" is right up my alley.

Walsh, described on the back cover as "a brilliant young critic" does not focus exclusively on printed word. Two of the six short chapters chapters in this essay-long book are about fiction published online, one being a sort of fanfiction and the other being what she describes as "underground." Other chapters focus on popular authors whose work is frequently published overseas, young authors, science fiction, and popular crime novels.

This essay ends up being mostly a categorized list of authors and their important works. The answer to the question "why does it matter what people are reading in China?" has a very trite answer: because it's a big country. It would be a difficult task, but no psychological or sociological insights are offered.

In addition, there was no mention of the non-fiction that Chinese readers consume, and scant mention of the classical poetry and literature that remains in publication.

I would like to see more critical evaluations of the Chinese authors whose works do get translated to English, such as an in-depth look at Yan Lianke's library. I think I was expecting that from these essays, but there was very little critical or thorough information. ( )

What can we learn from the state of Chinese fiction? This seemingly bizarre question is the subject of The Subplot, another in the superlative series of short books from Columbia Global Reports. Megan Walsh has read an amazing amount of Chinese fiction and has researched the background of both the authors and the circumstances. The results are most revealing. China, shall we says, thinks different.

In China, it used to be that if you wrote good poetry, you could get a good civil service career. Today, writing is one of riskiest paths anyone can take. The omnipotent Xi Jinping set the stage for extreme caution when he announced in 2014 that: "Modern art and literature needs to take patriotism as its muse, guiding the people to establish and adhere to correct views of history, the nation, the country, and culture." This would have sucked all the air out of the room anywhere else, but Chairman Mao had already colored in that box decades earlier. Walsh says: "Mao placed a blanket ban on all genre fiction because, naturally, there was no crime in socialist China, no need for fantasy when society defers to science, and no use for romance when one loved the Party above all else."

This stifling diktat has of course crippled nonfiction, which must bend and twist to meet the demands of patriotism first, but for fiction it has inspired creative workarounds - until they become too popular.

So China's literary scene has developed differently. A third of printed books are self-help, compared to 6% in the USA. Fiction makes up just 7%, but a lot of important factual work ends up there. Walsh says nonfiction authors can be found publishing novels, because if they published their findings as fact, their books could be censored or banned, and they could be canceled from publishing or from their day jobs. Bans from working or participating in all media loom over everyone. So symbolism and substitutions figure significantly in Chinese novels.

And still there is risk. This is because there are no laws, just diktat. Authors have to guess the flavor of the hour when they put words to paper. She cites one author who wrote about corruption, figuring his book would be dead on arrival, censored into nothing. But exactly the opposite happened; the censors didn't cut a word. He had hit a brand new sweet spot because President Xi had just begun his campaign to oust the most flagrant of the corrupt from their positions (outside his own family). So it was more than okay for someone to expose the depths of it. It was actually desirable.

But for every result like that, there are many more where writers might even be jailed for writing that does not demonstrate correct thinking. Especially if they are successful. Walsh says "Controversial topics are generally overlooked by the government as long as they don't sell. But draconian punishment for the most successful transgressors is a commonplace tactic."

Asking for it would include writing about the border territories of the Uyghurs and other ethnicities. China's reading habits are not allowed to include those who are not Han Chinese, unless they express joy for what the country and the party have done for them. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tiananmen - best not to go there if you want to survive as a writer. Even bookstore owners have been disappeared over them.

Going round the censors by publishing overseas doesn't necessarily work either. It will still get authors canceled at home, and their intended audience in China will likely have no access to those books at all.

It's the biggest single books market in the world. So what do the Chinese read?

There is a very lively online e-book scene, like soap operas in print, where books go on for hundreds of chapters, and authors grind out anywhere from 2000 to 20,000 words (100 pages) a day to keep up with demand. They have produced celebrity writers, film and tv tie-ins, and little of lasting value.

Uniquely to China, there is a fashion online for boy-boy romance novels and comics, written by girls. Apparently they must be written by girls to qualify. Girls know these things best.

In a chapter on whodunnits, Walsh finds even in this normally harmless pabulum for the masses, authors do not and cannot know where the line is. If a private detective makes police look bad, is that over the line? Under Mao, she says, "crime fiction vanished. Given that crime was clearly the product of unjust bourgeois and capitalist societies, it was irrelevant to Mao's law-abiding socialist society." Today it is available, but it seems strained.

The line is constantly shifting, without notice or process as government reshapes history and implements new policy. She says government expends enormous amounts to erase the past as it actually was, replacing it with the China Dream history, in order to focus on the future. Where they intersect, in the present, is a gamble for any writer.

Walsh describes numerous books from the rich sci-fi sector, where there might be some level of safety for writers. As in any culture, there is a huge number of people writing, and she does her best to feature at least the prominent. She even taps into the new nostalgia rage for back to basics- an unrealistic longing for the villages "that urbanites have never visited." Where life was simple and satisfying. This of course suffers from the erasure of history like nothing else does. It neatly forgets the poverty, hardship, famine, the terror and tortures of the Cultural Revolution and the Hundred Days Flowering, the melting of all metal tools and utensils in backyard furnaces, to make patriotic "steel". It's what drove millions to the cities, even though they weren't legally allowed to settle there and lived without any of the rights of residents.

This is not a criticism of China. Nostalgia is no different anywhere it festers, including in the USA with its Make America Great Again.

Chinese writers quite naturally run the gamut of styles and genres, filling in gaps wherever they find them. I confess I have only reviewed one of them, a book of essays by Han Han, who took his youthful winnings in the writing game and plowed them into car racing.

Walsh covers the bases, and points out all these political twists and turns, but she hasn't made the book about them. Reading it familiarizes the reader with important names in Chinese literature, their successes, their fears and their innovations just to pursue their craft. The outside pressures, as the title suggests, are but The Subplot.

David Wineberg ( )