Ahead of the upcoming Sixth Tone China Writing Contest, Sixth Tone invited three of China’s most fascinating and boundary-pushing nonfiction practitioners —
Chen Nianxi, Yuan Ling, and
Zhang Huiyu — to take part in a roundtable discussion on Chinese nonfiction on March 6, 2022. The Chinese-language event was hosted by Lin Shiqi, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.
For the benefit of readers unable to attend the event, we have excerpted and translated a portion of the conversation.