ABSTRACT
Shanghai Baby, a sexually explicit narrative of a young Shanghai woman’s multiple love affairs, was the most widely discussed Chinese novel of the late 1990s, providing a momentary focus for people talking about changing sexual standards among Chinese youth (see Wei Hui 1999). Though banned as pornographic by the Chinese authorities and laden with literary clichés and ethnic stereotypes, Shanghai Baby also has its defenders. One of them is Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the US House. In a reader review on the commercial Amazon.com website, Gingrich (2002) writes: ‘If there is even one-tenth as much artistic and personal freedom among the youth in Beijing and Shanghai as this book portrays ... then China has already decentralized and loosened the power of the secret police to a degree unthinkable in the Soviet Union at any point before its final three years’.
