In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King discusses pivotal works of fiction published under China’s Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Later authors produced works exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.