Reading List
Chan Koonchung
Chinese Novelist and Magazine Founder
Chan Koonchung was born in Shanghai in 1952 and studied at the University of Hong Kong and Boston University. He worked as a reporter in Hong Kong and in 1976 co-founded City Magazine. He also founded Green Power and Green Garden Organic Farm, and has lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States and Beijing. His dystopian novel The Fat Years appeared in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2013 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. His picks here are five classic utopian and dystopian novels, from Looking Backward and The Iron Heel to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and Swastika Night.
1984
by George Orwell · 1949 · Fiction
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China, though they also know there are a lot of differences.” — via Interview, August 2013
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley · Classics
“So in a way Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four complement each other when we try to measure what is happening in China now.” — via Interview, August 2013
Swastika Night
by Katharine Burdekin · 2016 · Dystopian
“But I was interested in its description of a sustainable fascist state.” — via Interview, August 2013
Looking Backward
2000-1887
by Edward Bellamy · 2000 · Classics
“It was very prescient, in the sense that Bellamy almost tells the future of a certain Communist country that came two decades later.” — via Interview, August 2013
The Iron Heel
by Jack London · 2006 · Classics
“Jack London wrote about a world where American democracy degenerates into an oligarchic state, very similar to a fascist state.” — via Interview, August 2013
