Title: Introduction to Chinese Cultural History / The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature / 01.8 Post-Tiananmen: The Rise of Consumer Culture 1989–present

Front: What was "the most significant phenomenon" of the 1990s cultural scene?
Back: The commodification of culture after market reforms and influx of capital from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Literature popularized.
Some writers positioned themselves as "pure art against the stench of the popular".

Front: Who is Gao Xingjian?
Back: Literature nobel prize winner, first Chinese one, relocated to Paris, says that artist should retreat from politics.

Front: What was the subject of the new realist fiction of the 1990s?
Back: "attempts to describe realistically the problems of living and coping in the freewheeling capitalism of postsocialist China"

Front: A significant development in the more recent literature on the mainland?
Back: Internet literature. "China has arguably the most active and creative literary presence on the Internet of any nation.". Arguments over poetics as well as popular-genre fiction, e.g. time travel fiction, grave robbery fiction, romance, sci-fi. Some get popular on the internet and then get into print.

Front: Who was the second Chinese person to be granted a Nobel Prize in Literature?
Back: Mo Yan in 2012.