This feminist perspective on Chinese modernism focuses on six writers: Lu Xun, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Zhaxi Dawa, Su Tong, and Yu Hua. Partly because Confucianism perceived women and fiction as inferior, radical intellectuals in modern China used them to represent their subversive positions.

This feminist perspective on Chinese modernism focuses on six writers: Lu Xun, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Zhaxi Dawa, Su Tong, and Yu Hua. Partly because Confucianism perceived women and fiction as inferior, radical intellectuals in modern China used them to represent their subversive positions. Women and fiction became related by a shared inferiority. Lu argues that the sometimes ambivalent attitude of contemporary Chinese male writers towards women reveals an inherent limit to their subversion. The refusal of male writers to accept women as equals represents a nostalgic attachment to the hierarchical power structure they intend to subvert. Despite the prevailing cultural nihilism, revolution has become a violent transition of power between fathers and sons, and the oppositional politics generated by cultural nihilism has constantly reestablished the past social structure under a different name.

Introduction
1. Revolution: hope without future or future without hope?
2. Red Sorghum: limits of transgression
3. Can Xue: what is so paranoid in her writings?
4. Quest in time and space as a new history of ancient and modern Tibet
5. Femininity and masculinity in Su Tong's trilogy
6. Violence and cultural nihilism
Conclusion.