Ch'ien Chung-shu's Fortress Besieged was first published in China in 1947, and notwithstanding its popularity and deserved acclaim it has not appeared in print since the 1949 Revolution. It remains the last of the few winners China has entered in the great novel race this century…. This sardonic black comedy has only recently been translated into any Western language, and it is the case that even the best of pre-1949, and certainly all post-revolutionary literature, in China remains pretty well outside the international main stream of the age. But Fortress Besieged can in one sense be considered a pace-maker, since it is the first and only Chinese contribution to that familiar genre, the novel of the anti-hero, and not merely because the protagonist, Fang Hung-chien, at one memorable juncture, delivers a disastrously embarrassing public address…. The ineffectual and dishonest, but sympathetic pseudo-graduate Fang armed with his utterly phoney Ph.D...