Pamela Hunt, our very first winner of the BACS Early Career Researcher Prize, provides the first English-language analysis and close reading of Xu Zechen’s work, arguing that we must take masculinity and its representations into account as we look at travel and travellers in contemporary Chinese fiction. Jie Li writes about the attractiveness of Glasnost as a type of government-led democracy in 1980s China and as a way to signal support for Zhao Ziyang by Chinese scholars. Two essays on Taiwan by Ming-yeh Rawnsley, James Smyth, and Jonathan Sullivan complement the issue.