ABSTRACT
Jia Pingwa's prose emphasizes the rapid changes taking place in the countryside. The land reform and collectivization movements provide only a far-away background for the impulsively thoroughgoing changes of the 1980s that resulted from the flexible economic policies of the Peking reformers around Deng Xiao-ping and Zhao Ziyang. His major novel in this vein, Fuzao (Turbulence, 1987), won a Mobil Oil Pegasus prize in literature, after being selected by a committee from the Chinese Writers' Association. How rural stasis and rural change have come to inform his fiction is the subject of his essay below.
