Chengdu, the capital city of western China’s Chengdu province with a whopping population of twenty-one million people (at least). Though only China’s fourth most populous city it’s the transport hub of Sichuan, surrounded by agriculture (all those Sichuan hot peppers for the local dish of super spicy hotpot), forests (with all those pandas) and a major centre of China’s universities.
Many of those universities are specialists in science and, relatedly, Chengdu has become a city known for its literature—but overwhelmingly the sci-fi genre. In fact in 2023 The 81st World Science Fiction Convention was held at the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum—the first time China had hosted the event, the largest sci-fi event globally.
But there’s also room for a little crime writing too—but with the caveats you’ll have noted from our other Crime and the City columns on China (Shanghai and Beijing) that the genre is heavily censored with no bent cops, corrupt officials or anyone ever getting away with it. The general media silence around major crime and supposed ninety-nine percent conviction rate also mean that true crime as a genre has been largely absent. Still…there are a few bangers….
And primary among them is Murong Xuecun, the pen name of the Chinese writer Hao Qun. In his twenties Murong was working as a sales manager in the car industry when he started posting his first novel Chengdu Please Forget Me Tonight on the internet.
In 2002 it became a cult hit amongst young urban Chinese looking for edgier writing after the era of the so-called “hooligan” literature writers, epitomized by Wang Shuo (see “Crime and the City: Beijing”) and writing in a language familiar to young urbanites about themes of soulless and empty city living. The Party natutrally thought this all too nihilist and supressed many of these books. But Murong attracted around five million online readers.
The book was then picked up by a Chinese publisher, successfully issued and then translated into English as Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu (2014), translated by Harvey Thomlinson. It’s an unflinching, darkly comic take life in modern China. It’s the story of three young men, Chen Zhong, Li Liang and Big Head Wang and their struggling lives in Chengdu.
The trio dream big but are stuck in dead-end jobs, worn down by gambling debts, excessive drinking, drugs, and prostitutes. It all comes to a crashing head of course while also being a great guide to the underbelly of Chengdu. As with the slightly earlier “hooligan” literature genre there is an air of fatalism hanging over everything in Murong Xuecun.
Murong became an outspoken critic of literary and media censorship in China and criticised the crackdowns and media blackouts around Covid-19 in 2020 (his writing on this are collected as Deadly Quiet City: Stories From Wuhan, COVID Ground Zero). Murong fled China in August 2021 and settled in Australia.
Zhou Haohui is regarded as one of the top suspense authors in China today. His online series based on his novels has received more than 2.4 billion views and achieved almost legendary status among Chinese online dramas. But the books are well worth reading too.
Death Notice (2018, translated by Zac Haluzza) is set in Chengdu. A shocking manifesto is released by an anonymous vigilante known as Eumenides, a war against the corrupt legal system, with Eumenides acting as judge and executioner. The public starts nominating potential targets, and before long hundreds of names are added to his kill list.
The 4/18 Task Force, an elite group of detectives and specialists, is assembled to catch Eumenides. In the process, they discover alarming connections to an eighteen-year-old cold case, and they find out that some members of the team have much to hide.
By the way, the Chinese original of Death Notice was set in an unnamed Chinese city, but the American publishers wanted more “local color” so Zhou rewrote the book set in Chengdu amid the spices and humidity and teaming urbanism of the massive city.
Zhou followed up his massive success with Death Notice with Fate: Death Notice II (2020). We’re back in Chengdu and this time two students are violently murdered. The only clue left by the killer is a death notice. The executioner? The supposedly deceased Eumenides.
Now Captain Pei Tao and his task force face a terrifying prospect: that Eumenides left a protégé to carry on his work. As we’ve noted before in this column, crime is often a problematic genre in China due to censorship and Party control, but Zhou Haohui has become a genuine popular phenomenon in the genre.
Lawrence Westwood is a British writer with a specialism in computer law and IP enforcement as well as a long-standing fascination with the history of China. He’s also the author of two Philip Ye Novels, the first being The Willow Woman (2019).Ye is half English, half Chinese, and a homicide detective with the Chengdu Public Security Bureau (PSB). He’s a good detective and, just to be a bit different, ghosts often intrude in on his investigations.
Ye is drawn into the search for a missing, vulnerable boy during which he meets Xu Ya, a brilliant public prosecutor new to Chengdu and with her worldly-wise assistant Fatty Deng. All three are soon on the trail of a mysterious figure known as The Willow Woman.
Ye returns in Liberation Street (2023) with Prosecutor Xu Ya of the People’s Procuratorate investigating the murder on a hot summer Chengdu night of a politically-connected businessman in Plum Tree Pagodas, a luxury apartment complex owned by the influential family Fu. It’s a secret investigation—not for public consumption.
Meanwhile Ye has returned from a holiday in the U.K. to discover that his protégé, Constable Ma Meili, has, against his strict instructions, taken on the case of a vicious killing of a retired army general—another secret case. And so a collision course is set—Ye and Xu Ya, the police and the Communist Party, everyone and the humid streets of Chengdu. One hopes Ye and Xu Ya will return in a third book.
Cath Staincliffe is another U.K. author, a best-selling novelist, radio playwright and the creator of ITV’s hit series, Blue Murder. To be honest, I’m not quite sure how she ended up writing this standalone novel set in Chengdu: Half the World Away (2015). After graduating from uni, Lori heads off traveling and arrives in Chengdu to work as a private English tutor.
Back in Manchester, her parents Jo and Tom follow her adventures on her blog. But suddenly communication stops. When the silence persists a frantic Jo and Tom report her missing and then travel to Chengdu to search for their Lori in totally unfamiliar country and city. It quickly becomes apparent that Chengdu is a long, long way from Manchester!
And an interesting Chengdu-set true crime study—Di Wang’s Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939-1949 (2018). In 1939, residents of a rural village near Chengdu watched as Lei Mingyuan, a member of a violent secret society known as the Gowned Brothers, executed his teenage daughter.
Six years later, Shen Baoyuan, a sociology student at Yenching University, arrived in the town to conduct fieldwork on the society that once held sway over local matters. She got to know Lei Mingyuan and his family, recording many rare insights about the murder and the Gowned Brothers’ inner workings. A fascinating, yet terrifying, tale of secret societies, claustrophobic villages and violence.
And finally, a-hard-to-find classic that is really well worth seeking out. Li Jieren was a Chinese writer and translator, native of Chengdu who offered realistic portrayals of Chengdu and Sichuan province during the late Qing period (roughly the mid nineteenth century to 1911). He remains best known for a trilogy of long novels set in Sichuan published during the 1930s.
The first and most widely acclaimed of these was translated into English as Ripple on Stagnant Water (1936, translated by Bret Sparling and Yin Chi). In the small market town of Heaven’s Turn on the Chengdu Plain, a simple-minded shopkeeper marries a beautiful village girl who is determined to rise above her station. The novel, set in the final years of the Qing dynasty, is populated with gangsters, prostitutes, farmers, dilettantes, bureaucrats and Christian converts, all drawn from the author’s acquaintance.
It’s a fascinating read, and a tough one to translate, not least because Li uses colloquial Sichuanese dialect mixed with literary Mandarin. Sadly the two later volumes in the series, Before the Storm (1936) and Great Wave (1937,) are yet to be translated into English but Ripple on Stagnant Water can be read as a standalone novel and gives a wonderful sense of Chengdu and Sichuanese culture.
The books here all give a flavor of Chengdu over the last two hundred years, and show a massive Chinese city in turmoil, expanding and constantly in change. Chengdu remains a well-known center for Chinese sci-fi, but hopefully it’s crime and other literature will also be sought out by avid readers.
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