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. returns from Europe to his homeland just in time for the 1937 Japanese invasion. Though the shadow of war and its consequent social crack-up remains a constant threat throughout the action of the novel it never amounts to more than a subdued if subtle accompaniment to the hero's own personal débâcle with the ludicrous progress of his love life leading to the final collapse of his short-lived marriage. Thus the state of matrimony and not beleaguered 1937 China is the real besieged fortress….

[In Fortress Besieged, by] setting the misfortunes and escapades of the inadequate Fang against the background of the larger tragedy of war the author adds to the tone of facetious irony in a story peopled by third-rate academics, pseudo-intellectuals and a monstrous regiment of liberated women. Certainly Fortress Besieged has been rightly termed the most carefully structured novel of the modern Chinese age. Its nine chapters fall roughly into four divisions each with its own central female character, each with her own 'humour' and all of whom lead our anti-hero gently up love's garden path and see him off on his way to life's garbage trip….

It certainly is indisputable that an inseparable component of the novel's unity and structure is the author's fluid use of linguistic and semantic manipulation—subtle shifts from one style to another to switch the mood of his narrative or the direction of his irony. To achieve this he frequently changes from straightforward colloquial Chinese to a rather arch use of the literary wen-yan style—and often accompanies this shift with what I would call 'a culture gloss'…. Such use of classical reference is not just confined to Chinese sources but often culled from European tradition as well—and not simply to add a little snobbish saffron but rather to heighten the overall mood of jaundiced intellectualism. (p. 18)