Chinese crime fiction () is an umbrella term which generally refers to Sinophone literature concerned with the investigation and punishment of criminal acts. In mainland China the most popular subgenre is "detective fiction" (, often abbreviated to 推理小说 tuīlǐ xiǎoshuō or 侦探小说 zhēntàn xiǎoshuō).
Origins and Brief Timeline
In the 1950s, crime fiction was dominated by "legal system literature", which included legal system poetry, crime reportage, and works about civil conflicts. The 1980s saw the rise of the less progressive-sounding public security literature, which marked a shift from the ancient and respected "court case literature."
From 1896, Sherlock Holmes was translated into Chinese. During the 1890s-1920s, European-style detective fiction was popular in China.
Between 1949 and 1977, no work of fiction told of crimes committed by the gentry. Crimes were also not reported by the press as the socialist system was not supposed to foster crime. Sherlockian novels were then characterized as capitalist and low grade, arguing they aroused base passions for sex and violence.
Mainland China
Crime Fiction in the Song and Ming Dynasties
During the Song and Ming dynasties, crime fictions varied in themes. Gong'an (crime-case) fiction and swindler stories were considered the most popular subgenres. Written in colloquial rather than literary Chinese, they nearly always featured district magistrates or judges in the higher courts.
The gong'an genre was among the new types of vernacular fiction that developed from the Song to the Ming Dynasties. The plots usually begin with a description of the crime (often including realistic detail of contemporary life) and culminated in the exposure of the deed and the punishment of the guilty. Sometimes two solutions to a mystery were posited, but the correct solution is reached through a brilliant judge.
Song Dynasty (960–1279) In the Song Dynasty the growth of commerce and urban society created a demand for a new kind of crime fiction–namely gong'an fiction that focused on entertaining the upper and merchant class. One of the most celebrated heroes of such tales was Judge Bao Zheng, or "Dragon Plan Bao," who was originally based on a historical government official. Featured in hundreds of stories, Bao became the archetype of the incorruptible official in a society in which miscarriages of justice in favour of the rich and powerful were all too common. Not all crime stories have happy endings, and some were evidently written with the aim of exposing the brutal methods of corrupt judges who–after accepting bribes–would extract false confessions by torture and condemned innocent people to death. In some tales, the crimes are also exposed with the aid of supernatural forces.
Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) In the Ming dynasty, the social influence of the merchant class steadily increased as a result of the development of capitalism. As a result of their change of social status, the merchant class demanded more literary entertainment, thus crime fiction featuring merchants as main characters thrived. These stories particularly focused on the way merchants handled money.
One of the subgenres that developed during the time was swindler stories. Swindler stories focused on elaborate deception for monetary gain. The most famous swindler stories collection is The Book of Swindles by Zhang Yingyu finished in Late Ming. The book is composited with 24 sub-categories of swindles, which covered merely all kinds of deception in Ming society. Zhang wrote the book for a manual of self-protection as well as an expert guide to the art of deception.
Translations and Original Crime Fiction During the Republican Era
This was the Golden Age of the Chinese detective story. This era was flooded with translations of Western works as well as native Chinese series detectives.
Short story writer Cheng Xiaoqing (程小青 ) was the most successful and prolific author of original Chinese crime fiction during the Republican Era in mainland China. His stories are noted for their similarity to the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with an selected stories being having been published by the University of Hawai'i Press under the title Sherlock in Shanghai in 2007, translated by Timothy C. Wong.
Cheng Xiaoqing's contemporary, Sun Liaohong (孫了紅) also created a series of Chinese detective novels which are said to have been modeled on the Arsène Lupin stories.