By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

UCLA professor Michael Berry has to date translated 11 Chinese-language works of fiction, three of which were published in early 2025. Among them is "Dead Souls," the last book in a trilogy by one of China's most celebrated science fiction writers, Han Song.

UCLA International Institute, July 1, 2025 — Michael Berry, professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at UCLA, has published translations of five novels by modern Chinese writers in the last two years. In addition, the Taiwanese publisher Showwe recently published a two-volume, Chinese-language collection of his interviews with Chinese authors. 

“Between the Lines: Conversations with Contemporary Chinese Writers,” the two-volume collection of Berry's interviews with Chinese authors.

Among Berry’s latest literary translations are the last novel in the “Hospital” trilogy by Chinese science fiction writer and journalist Han Song, plus two novels by the celebrated Chinese novelist Fang Fang, “Soft Burial” (Columbia, 2025) and “The Running Flame” (Columbia, 2025). All three were published this year.

Berry had previously translated “Wuhan Diary” (Harper Collins, 2020) for Fang Fang; his English-language version was used to translate the diary into over 10 other languages The nasty disinformation campaign subsequently waged against the author in China, which also embroiled Berry, led him to write “Translation, Disinformation and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign” (Palgrave, 2022) and to translate two of her novels as a gesture of support for the author.

Fang Fang continues to have pariah status in the official Chinese literary world of which she was long a respected member. Yet a 2024 online Chinese-language interview of Berry about “Wuhan Diary” by independent journalist Chai Jing has to date accumulated over 903,000 views, indicating that the author remains popular among Chinese readers.

Translator, scholar and public commentator

To get an idea of the pace at which Berry works, the first two novels in the Han triology were published in 2023 — “Hospital” in March, “Exorcism” in November — with the third, “Dead Souls,” published in January 2025 (all by Amazon Crossing). Not only is each book over 400 pages, Han writes in an extraordinarily difficult stream-of-consciousness style that is very challenging to translate.

Berry spent five years on translating the trilogy, with a Guggenheim Fellowship supporting his work on “Dead Souls.” The two newest Fang Fang translations were published in March of this year, in part supported by a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.

In a recent op-ed on artificial intelligence in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Berry said the three Han novels were one of the difficult projects he had ever undertaken, in part because he chose material that could not be translated by an AI translation platform.

“I wanted to translate something only a human would be capable of reworking in a new language… Arguably more experimental fiction than standard, the trilogy describes a dark world where everyone is a patient caught in a cycle of endless suffering.

“Meanwhile, the entire city where these patients live — the entire world, in fact — is a massive hospital. Pulling the strings is an AI algorithm called ‘Siming, the Director of Destinies.’ As the trilogy unfolds, Siming goes awry, spinning out of control, driving the hospital into greater chaos and eventually trying to kill itself.”

More strange even than Han’s imaginary world or his style, however, may be the fact that the first “review” of the translation of “Dead Souls” to appear was the product of an AI bot. “What would it mean if the only reviews of a novel that set out to warn us of a maniacal AI algorithm gone haywire ended up being delivered by machines?” he asked.

Reviews of the novels by Han and Fang Fang are now starting to appear in U.S. mainstream newspapers and magazines, reaching an American audience for whom Berry consciously translates.

Ian Johnson, himself the author of three books on China, reviewed Fang Fang’s “Soft Burial,” in The Atlantic in late March of this year. Published in China in 2016, the book explores the brutal land reform implemented by the Chinese Communist Party before and after it took power in 1949, ending in roughly 1953.

In May, Chinese Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien published a review in The New York Review of Books of both “Soft Burial” and “The Running Flame,” the story of a poor rural woman prisoner awaiting death for murder after suffering terrible abuse (first published in Chinese in 2001). And Vivian Wang wrote a long article on “Hospital” and Han’s oeuvre as a whole in The New York Times, also in May.

Berry’s most recent translations build on his extensive body of work — scholarly cultural history, translations of Chinese-language novels and books on (and interviews with) Chinese filmmakers — all of which make contemporary Chinese culture more accessible to American audiences. For afficionados of the “wuxia” genre, Berry also participated in a podcast about Chinese filmmaker King Hu in late May.

The current U.S. administration’s on-and-off-again tariffs on Chinese goods and services, coupled with harsh and inconsistent visa guidelines for international students and ugly rhetoric have again raised the political temperature of U.S.-China relations while doing nothing to further American knowledge of modern China.

Berry addressed the current U.S. political climate, and the uncanny parallels between the political tactics of Mao and Trump, in an April 2025 article in the online publication, ChinaFile. “As a scholar of modern Chinese fiction, film and cultural history, much of what has unfolded throughout the American political arena over the past few months has felt eerily reminiscent of events from the era of high socialism and the reign of Mao Zedong,” he wrote.

“Of all the eerie echoes of Chinese political history that seem to be reverberating through contemporary America, none speaks more loudly than the dark cloud of silence setting in — mingzhe baoshen [to keep one’s head down and mouth shut].”

In light of the tensions in the current U.S.-China relationship, it’s an ideal moment to read the work of contemporary Chinese writers.

Published: Tuesday, July 1, 2025