Cai Xiang begins by foregrounding the historical importance of the Chinese revolution and situating its legitimacy within the international context of China’s struggle for national independence and for the liberation of subaltern classes. He complicates the issues by identifying the challenges of the period after the revolution and the crises that revolutionary China faced, including the extent to which these were manifested and actively addressed in the literature of socialist China. Rather than passively reflecting the challenges and crises, however, Cai argues that the seventeen-year literature (written in the period 1949–66) must be seen as part of active postrevolutionary practices whose concerns and expressions were closely related to socialist transformations in their political, social, economic, and cultural forms.