Next, a plea to our friends who are writing in China not to write with foreigners in mind. Now that contemporary Chinese writing is beginning to find more readers abroad, there is a danger that writers will aim at foreign readers instead of domestic ones. The writing we Anglophones will respond to most warmly will generally be precisely the writing that is most clearly intended for Chinese readers.Who, after all, is the Chinese writer who has made a bigger impact than any other in English-speaking countries these last twenty years? None of those I have mentioned so far, but a politician who died in the 1970s. And his works, apart from a few interviews with foreigners, were nearly all addressed to Chinese problems and Chinese readers. His style was clear, strong, and effective, and very Chinese too, being hardly influenced by foreign models. Yet he survived translation to be the idol of 1960s radicals around the world, and put words and expressions into the English language.So please don't write for us, but write for your primary reader, leaving us to choose(by criteria that may well seem quite absurd to you)what may be accessible to us ignorant Anglophones. And don't worry in the least about what we think. Few Anglophone authors lose sleep over their standing in China, and that seems a good example to follow.Take whatever you like from abroad, but only what you need for your own purposes. Blind imitation of foreign models is unlikely to bring foreign recognition. Only what works in your own culture has any chance of surviving the transition to another.From Insuperable Barriers? By W. J. E. Jenner