No nation boasts more manufacturing capacity than the People's Republic of China, yet few countries' literary products are less known in the English-speaking world. Witnesses to the country's revolutionary modernisation, China's writers have experienced historical whiplashes and sprints forward on an extreme scale. The zhiqing - the educated youth whom Mao 'sent down' to the countryside and who experienced a decade of extreme austerity - are at a vast distance from the generations below them, who have lived through an epoch of self-assertion and creative dreaming. In China today, writers across generations look abroad, to new technologies, as well as to rich veins in the Chinese literary past for new modes of expression.

Granta's special issue on the writing of contemporary China collects the mainland's most thrilling voices. Featuring memoir from Xiao Hai on moving to Shenzhen at fifteen to work in its factories, reportage from Han Zhang, who visits the working-class writers carving out a living in Picun, an essay from Yun Sheng on the rapid rise of virtual relationships, as well as new fiction from Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Shuang Xuetao, Zhang Yueran, Ban Yu, Jianan Qian and many more.