[citation needed] A strong young man who moves to Beiping in the 1920s, where he finds employment first as a laborer and then as a rickshaw puller.

Formerly a rickshaw puller, Er Qiangzi squanders the money from the sale of his daughter on alcohol, eventually relying on her earnings to support his addiction.

Left with no choice, Xiangzi returns to work for Fourth Master Liu, the boss of a thriving rickshaw rental company.

Although honest and industrious, Xiangzi finds himself entangled between Fourth Master Liu and his manipulative daughter Huniu, ten years his senior.

Her father disowns her and the couple live together in a tenement compound, progressively becoming poorer due to Huniu's spendthrift ways and Xiangzi's meager earnings.

Later, Huniu befriends the meek and long-suffering Fuzi, whose alcoholic father has forced her into prostitution, renting her a room in which to meet clients.

Overcome by apathy and depression, Xiangzi indulges in alcohol, tobacco, and prostitutes, becoming friendlier with his fellow rickshaw pullers but less diligent in his work.

No longer thrifty, he spends his earnings on alcohol, tobacco, and brothels, becoming lazy, selfish, and dishonest, neglecting his physical appearance and health, and contracting numerous cases of unspecified veneral diseases.

When Ruan Ming takes money from an unnamed political group to unionize Beijing's rickshaw pullers, Xiangzi sells him out for a small sum.

His advancing venereal disease ends his career as a rickshaw puller, forcing him to take menial jobs as a professional mourner, his body prematurely decaying and his spirit broken.

As Xiangzi pulls a rickshaw, the author says that "A man with his physique, his ability to endure so much, and his determination should not be treated like a pig or a dog and ought to be able to hold down a job."

Xiangzi was born into poverty and presented with few options to escape it, leading him to believe that the hard work and honesty of his youth were a waste and hastening his descent.

[5] For instance, the final sentences read, "Handsome, ambitious, dreamer of fine dreams, selfish, individualistic sturdy, great Hsiang Tzu.

No one knows how many funerals he marched in, and no one knows when or where he was able to get himself buried, that degenerate, selfish, unlucky offspring of society's diseased womb, a ghost caught in Individualism's blind alley.

According to the introductory section of the Foreign Languages Press (Beijing) English translation, "Before Liberation [Lao She] wrote many works of literature, including his best novel Camel Xiangzi (or Rickshaw Boy) to expose and denounce the old society.

"[citation needed] In 1948, leftist critic Xu Jia lamented that Lao She intended to depict a sick society or bad luck that drove Xiangzi to his fate.

The excessive depiction of sex and the negative implicit comments on Chinese society in Rickshaw Boy contributed to the popularity of earlier translations in the United States.

[5](subscription required) In 1950, Baren argued that “Lao She failed to depict the revolutionary potential of rickshaw pullers" and that his novel expressed a “reactionary” attitude, which is why the novel was not emphasized in literary histories and college textbooks in China between 1949 and the mid-1980s, and why during this time new editions were expurgated, deleting the novel's pessimistic conclusion, including Fuzi's suicide, turning Ruan Ming into a positive or neutral character, and removing scatological language and description of “naturalistic” detail, mostly to do with sex.

However, the censorship established in the People's Republic of China after the civil war required changes to Lao She's novel in terms of “negative image depiction”.

[5] Lao She enjoyed a prestigious position in the Chinese literary establishment and was named a "People's Artist" and "Great Master of Language.

In order to create a happy ending pleasing to American audiences, the English translation has Xiangzi rescue Fuzi (rendered as "Little Lucky One") from the brothel.

[7] Lao She never agreed to these changes, but because there was no copyright agreement between China and the United States at the time,[citation needed] he could not prevent the spread of this version of the novel.

[5] The first representative translation of the novel was by Jean M. James, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1979 under the English title Rickshaw: the novel Lo-t'o Hsiang Tzu.

[citation needed] The most recent authoritative translation is Rickshaw Boy: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Chinese Classics, 2010) by Howard Goldblatt (ISBN 9780061436925).

An opera based on the novel, composed by Guo Wenjing to a libretto by Xu Ying, premiered at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (China) in June 2014.