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 modernization, 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 many of the mainland's most thrilling voices - poets, novelists and non-fiction writers, as well as philosophers. The edition pays acute attention to differences in region, generation and style.