Written from a feminist perspective, this is a cultural and ideological study of modern China as seen in the writing of experimental fiction, one of the main attempts to subvert the conventions of socialist realism in contemporary Chinese literature. The book focuses on six writers: Lu Xun, the May Fourth radical included because of his influence on his descendants, and five contemporary writers of experimental fiction - Mo Yan, Can Xue, Zhaxi Dawa, Su Tong, and Yu Hua.

For thousands of years, the Confucian tradition has perceived women as equivalent to inferior men. Partly for this reason, radical intellectuals in modern China have used women as a means of representing their subversive positions. At the same time, these intellectuals have promoted vernacular fiction because the low status of the form and its language stands in opposition to classical Chinese and traditional literary forms.

In a sense, women as a gender and fiction as a genre have become historically interrelated by virtue of their shared inferiority.

The book shows how the sometimes ambivalent but always condescending attitude of contemporary Chinese male writers toward women reveals an inherent limit to their subversion that the object of their subversion ties them to - be they Confucianist or Communist ideologies. The implicit or explicit refusal of male writers to accept women as equals is shown to be symptomatic of a nostalgic attachment to the hierarchical power structure they intend to subvert.

Consequently, despite the prevailing cultural nihilism that Chinese radicals use to deny their ties to the past, revolution has often turned into a violent transition of power between aged fathers and rebellious sons.

In the same vein, the author argues that the oppositional politics partly generated by this cultural nihilism has constantly led toward reestablishing the past social structure, albeit with a change of names. Can Xue, the only woman in the group of writers studied, has tried to break this masculine circle, although her lonely and powerful voice has been regarded by many Chinese critics as evidence of her madness.