Uncompromising critics of the regime’s political blunders , like Wang Jo-wang (b. 1918), who had challenged paramount leader Teng Hsiao-p’ing (1904–1997) personally, even in this euphoric phase of reform were made to pay for their outspoken essays and reporting. They were subjected to all sorts of harassment, even harsh prison sentences.

Restless talents, such as the prose author and dramatist Chang Hsin-hsin (b. 1953) in her book Pei-ching jen (Chinese Lives; 1985), presented realistic portraits that contrasted sharply with the embellished picture of society as depicted in party propaganda. Attempts “to come to terms with the past” remained linked to the themes of the Cultural Revolution, as Feng Chi-ts’ai (b. 1942) demonstrated in his somewhat superficial and glowing stories, and especially in an ambitious reportage literary project, which, in the end, he was unable to complete and publish because of the changed political atmosphere. Tai Houying (b. 1938 and murdered in 1996), herself originally a misguided radical leftist and later a fervent advocate of “humanism,” gave a remorseful account—in her novel Jen a jen (Man, ah Man, or Stones of the Wall; 1980), written from Shanghai—of the fate suffered by the intellectuals at China’s universities and the seduction of an entire generation of young people by radicals close to the aging chairman Mao Tse-tung.