Over the past decade or so, writers of English-language scholarship on Chinese literature have been struggling to come to terms with the study of Mao-era culture. Pioneers such as Ban Wang and Xiaobing Tang started to incorporate the 1950s and 1960s into studies of Chinese culture that spanned the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶ Increasingly, edited volumes contain essays that account for Maoist culture, especially edited volumes on Chinese film.Footnote ⁷ These days there is usually at least one panel on the red classics or socialist cultural production at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Richard King's Milestones on a Golden Road is a welcome, groundbreaking monograph on literature produced between the Civil War and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It proves that a book devoted to literature of the Maoist period need not be structured by polemical arguments about the nature of the literary qualities (or lack thereof) in these rich texts.

Invoking the familiar Maoist metaphor of the correct path for literature and, indeed, life, most explicitly employed in Hao Ran's Cultural Revolution novel The Golden Road, King's book brings to life classic texts written between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s for readers who are by now far removed from the ideals that structure them. King uses four historical “mile markers” to structure his study, namely writing from the Civil War period, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the latter's immediate aftermath. The focus on these four moments allows King to address key literary issues, such as the use of revolutionary popular fiction in Ma Feng and Xi Rong's early text, Heroes of Lüliang (1946); Soviet socialist realism in Zhou Libo's The Hurricane (1948); or revolutionary realism plus revolutionary romanticism in Hao Ran's The Golden Road (1972). By pointing to important historical events that serve as mile markers, the metaphor of the golden road also facilitates consideration of political and historical aspects of cultural production, such as the Yan'an experience in the late 1940s or policy during the Great Leap Forward, especially as reflected in two stories of model workers, Hu Wanchun's “A Man of Outstanding Quality” (1959) and Li Zhun's “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” (1960). King concludes his study with an examination of the debt owed to the socialist tradition, both in terms of literary form and personal history, in post-Cultural Revolution scar literature, represented by Zhang Kangkang's The Dividing Line (1975), Chen Guokai's The Price (1980), and Zhang Yigong's The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong (1980). Readers who are inspired by his discussion of these stories are fortunate to be able to turn to King's Heroes of China's Great Leap Forward: Two Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), which contains full translations of “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” and The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong.

The many years King spent on this manuscript are evident in the wealth of both primary sources and secondary material employed in the book's narrative. King's sensitivity as a reader of fiction is demonstrated also in his readings of secondary sources. He can make productive use of scholarship on this period published on both sides of the Cold War. Thus, he uses studies such as Merle Goldman's Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) or Cyril Birch's edited volume Chinese Communist Literature (New York: Praeger, 1963) alongside articles written by Zhou Yang and Yao Wenyuan, and appraises all with equal gravity. King approaches the subject of the highly politicized nature of Maoist fiction with an equanimity that is difficult to achieve. His generous attitude is evident in statements such as: “Authors’ preparedness to offer such an optimistic portrayal of their society in return for publication and official support does not, in my view, make them hypocrites or quislings” (p. 8). Some of this generosity towards the authors comes from King's experience interviewing them. His readings of most of the texts in the book are enriched by his conversations with their authors, many of whom are now deceased. These interviews provide a deeper understanding of artistic creation in Maoist China, and while some readers may question their usefulness to literary analysis, they do a great deal to breathe life into King's narration of cultural life in mid-twentieth-century China.

Milestones on a Golden Road shares with readers the richness of Maoist literature, while keeping sight of the high stakes for the authors and of the subsequent disavowal of the politics that informs many of the stories. King does not let those politics prevent him from fully engaging the texts he studies, and his book will show a new generation of English-language readers that it is possible to experience the variety and excitement of the period without feeling the need to condemn its works or its authors, as so many earlier discussions of these texts have done.