[The title of Ch'ien's book Fortress Besieged] must ultimately refer to China under siege, not only by Japanese invaders but by all the pressures and innovations of the West—to Chinese culture sapped by all of modern history and betrayed from within by the half-baked, semi-Westernized intellectuals who infest this novel. But these vast themes are approached through a much smaller one. This novel is a comedy of manners—albeit erudite, sophisticated, philosophical. In its foreground it deals with a young man's blundering relations with women, and climaxes with his failing marriage. The title is not Chinese but is taken from a cynical French proverb: "Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those who are outside want to get in; those who are inside want to get out."

A comedy of manners? set in China from mid-1937 to late 1939, the first two and a half years of the Japanese invasion? Can such a thing be? There is almost nothing here that we would expect from a novel of wartime China. First of all there is no war; it is referred to (the Japanese are sneered at for being "generous only with bombs"), but we actually see no bombing, no fighting, no Rape of Nanking. When the Japanese occupy Shanghai, these people go on living almost normal bourgeois lives in the unoccupied French Concession. There is no ghastly poverty; the characters are landlords' children, bankers' children, university professors, etc. They are sometimes out of money, but they are not the poor of China. In the middle of the book they make a long journey through the wardisrupted rural provinces, but this involves Dickensian hilarities of buses jammed like sardine cans and bedbuggy inns, not the existential horrors of Asia. Chiang Kai-shek's police torture no one and Communism is never mentioned (Chiang's censorship in 1947 may have accounted for that)….

Fortress Besieged is a very funny book…. Much of the humor is recondite, much is gently elegiac, and much is gaily mean—plenty of sweeping cracks at Westerners in general, Frenchmen, Irish, Americans, Vietnamese, Japanese (understandable at the time), and most professions and character-types within China, especially women, and even more especially semi-Westernized intellectuals…. No character or group is portrayed as worthwhile; yet this is not a bitter comedy but a sad one, in the great Chinese tradition of sad/gay laments. All great literature, comic or tragic, must eventually deal with loss. The ultimate theme of Fortress Besieged is the desperate peril and likely fall of the great Chinese culture that once was—the loss of China. (p. 738)