Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai in 1953, lives in the United States and in English. My previous meetings with his world navaient been inconclusive, but Blue Dragon, White Tiger (original title: Redemption Shanghai) reads with pleasure. Small Chinese touches (quotes from famous poems of the authors of old, proverbs, Opera Suzhou) reach their goal, that put us in the mood and give us the appropriate references in a world where everything changes and yet nothing changes . We also note how Qiu Xiaolong uses his knowledge of Currentness Chinese (history of the dead pigs floating on a river, this is authentic).
The plot is not police quune end in itself; First of and it comes also to make us feel today's urban China. The novel still retains the poisonous climate-induced corruption of officials and the ostentatious luxury of the affluent and quun phenomenon that has been important there are few, the rise of a "neo-Maoism" that seems dow lexploitation politician of discontent masses and that of widespread dune less unequal society nostalgia.
In the background, the figure in the novel Lai, party secretary in Shanghai, Qiu allows dévoquer by transposing the figure of Bo Xilai, the all-powerful party secretary in Chongqing (Sichuan's largest city), which has dassaut wanted to take the party to the left and whose career was broken net there is little he was sentenced to life imprisonment 22 December 2013.
In the novel the character of Kai Gu Kailai = (wife of Bo Xilai)
The character of Daniel Newman = Neil Heywood
Nothing seems more fascinating to me the globe Shanghai to dusk, the Bund illuminated as quon can see Pudong, Pudong the Bund seen illuminated. If it is not a great prose writer and that he hardly noffre descriptions, the merit of Qiu Xiaolong is to pass in the novel something of the enormity of his subject, all seen through the eyes of a incorruptible official (disgraced thereby) in the best Chinese tradition.