Huang, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara,[1] described the book as a "search for the soul of modern China" in the introduction.

[2] The book is 600 pages long and has works spanning about 100 years until its publishing date, with almost 50 authors represented.

The portions of the book post 1990 are heavily focused on poetry and have less emphasis on urban fiction.

[1] Julia Lovell of The New York Times wrote that "it’s heartening to see a serious publisher, one whose list is geared to the general reader, invest in an anthology that manages to combine the established canon with less-well-known selections.

"[1] She argued that the book should have included works by Eileen Chang, and that male writers were represented too heavily in this anthology of modern Chinese writing.