The economic opening up of China also provided room for a certain level of artistic freedom, and authors have gradually taken advantage of it; one early genus was recounting of cultural revolution experiences e.g.

blog.bcchinese.net/bcblog/archive/2004/01/18/212.aspx 

www.boxun.com/hero/zhangyihe

which however generated only a limited amount of interest among today's readers, busily occupied by ecoomic and career issues; a second genus, concerning new social issues, e.g.

http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/index_79149.html

http://online.blog.edu.cn/2010/504014.html

http://www.hxzq.net/showcorpus.asp?id=13

have the additional problem of treading on current political sensitivities. The readers with free time and pocket money to spend on reading, the high school and early college students, are more into personal navel gazing and sentimentalities, such as what I discussed in http://www.seechina.org.cn/2010/03/26/post-80s-new-china-literature/

Given this market reality, the more recent works by Liuliu (六六 penname meaning 66

Like myself she is a foreign resident in Singapore - for more information see her personal website http://www.bachinese.com/66/) represented a major step forward, with both literary and social merit, and high commercial success. Her novel Humble Abode 蜗居 (note that Humble Abode is my translation of the title; her own English title was Dwelling Narrowness which is pretty obscure) was made into an extremely popular TV drama that was admired for its emotionally resonant portrayal of current social reality. It is the story of two sisters in Shanghai, the younger one, well educated and good looking, becoming the mistress of a corrupt official, in order to use her financial gains to help her family with their housing needs.

Given the widespread and often desperate chase after rapidly rising property prices, and frequent social disturbances due to evictions to clear land for construction projects with developers and municipal officials working together for their mutual benefit, the relevance of the novel's content to the readers and TV audience is obvious, but some other reactions might surprise: many comments on blogs and discussion forums, purportedly from young woment,  were along the line "it is so romantic to be a rich guy's mistress", and reporters have often enough received similar feedback from young women they interviewed to confirm that at least some of the comments were genuine.

Keeping concubines and mistresses used to be a common practice in China - partly due to the fact that a man's wife was usually chosen by his mother as a companion/servant, not as result of courtship and mutual agreement among the couple; a wealthy man was almost expected to find his pleasure with some other woman/women - but this has been outlawed since the founding of the People's Republic; to have it openly practised today and even socially accepted is something of a surprise.

In a recent episode on a TV dating programme, a pretty young female contestant was asked by a male participant: would you join me on the back of my biccyle? and gave the reply "I would rather weep in a BMW than laugh on a bicyle". I assume the young lady would not mind if the BMW owner already has a wife.