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“... Ha Jin’s Waiting, a love story set in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, won last year’s US National Book Award for Fiction, and has just received the less munificent, but classier, PEN/Faulkner Award. Dubbed, then, on both shoulders – once by the book-buying public, once by the literati. This is surprising, given that in places the novel is strikingly badly written ...”

“... There’s​ a strange moment in Ha Jin’s new novel when the narrator, Feng Danlin, an expatriate Chinese journalist writing on culture and politics for an independent news agency based in New York, is asked by one of the organisers of a festival of Chinese culture, held in Berlin, to assess a dozen or so translated novels that have been chosen as representative of modern writing in China ...”

“... Beijing Coma), has been infected with Maospeak. (The only pure writer under this rubric was Ha Jin, who, Link said, ‘writes only in English, in part to be sure that even subconscious influences do not affect his expression’.) Mo Yan’s defenders have long claimed that his political intent can’t be captured by talk of dissidence; nor does he ...”

“... earlier periods rarely did; they include even writers of English-language fiction – Yiyun Li or Ha Jin – as once Nabokov, if more modestly. The diaspora continues to grow, with Hong Kong supplying the latest arrivals. China’s most original political philosopher, Ci Jiwei, now lives in Oxford.In this setting, the historian Chen Jian has published a ...”