Little the Chinese read these days is available in translation outside specialised journals, while almost nothing written abroad about China is accessible to the Chinese. The obvious exceptions are the great classics from Confucius to The Dream of the Red Chamber - though few bother to read them now in China. A few copies of Wild Swans, Jung Chang's generational memoir, do circulate there: Chinese who lived through the Maoist decades say, "I should write a book like that too."