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Summary: If you're looking for the plot, you've missed the point.
Review: A number of the reviewers of this book on this site have commented on this novel's lack of plot. This is unfair. It has plot to spare, just not the sort of simple, follow-the-numbers plotline most of today's TV-raised readers seem to need. As a novel, it reads more as a slice of life (or lives) than a self-contained story, and from the perspective of a science fiction reader, this can serve (and does so here) to make the singular impact of this book one of total immersion in a well-thought-out, self-consistent future world. As an example of science fiction as extrapolation from the present, I can think of few works as good as this. As for this novel being an example of "gay and lesbian" fiction, one of the main characters happens to be gay. It is certainly a defining characteristic, especially in the future presented here, where homosexuality is again driven underground. I think we can gain some perspective on comments like this, however, from the fact that although most of the major characters are Chinese, no one has thought to characterize this novel as "Chinese fiction." All in all, China Mountain Zhang is a fine novel, with a narrative voice startlingly well-developed for a first-time novelist. I give this my highest recommendation--not the stuff of science-fiction adventure, but rewarding for those who care about finely crafted fiction.
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Summary: Life is hard, even in the furture.
Review: China Mountain Zhang is about ordinary people in an extraordinary world. It's all too easy in fiction to concentrate on the unnusual, on the heroes, on the 'big' picture. What is harder is to get inside the lives of those at the bottom, the ordinary people for whom life is not adventurous, but dull, slow and difficult. Zhang is human, not superhuman; his dilemma is not how to change the world or how to save civilization as we know it, but how to find a place for himself. There is plot, and there is resolution (contrary to what some seem to think), but the plot is subtle, and the resolution emotional, not only for Zhang, but also for the reader. This is a book that works as much by getting us to understand Zhang as by inspiring questions and emotions in ourselves. It's political, but the politics are personal, micro-level, those things that impact on everyone. As an evocation of the mundane sadness and suffering, hope and resolution in daily life, this book is not only unequalled in sci-fi, but is also up there with the best writing in any genre.
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Summary: Astonishing, vivid portrait of "real life"-- in the future
Review: CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG is one of the best SF novels of the decade. Crafted with plain, beautiful prose, it is rich in powerful and vivid characterizations of people living ordinary, often painful lives-- in a future setting, itself strange, original yet subtle and strongly convincing. The world is unfolded all the more realistically by the familiar problems the characters experience. Not a banal thriller plot, the novel unfolds through revealing incidents, rich in implications, deeply moving. This is a novel to read, not only for its vivid and brilliant portrait of a strange, future world, but for its startling portrayal of problems and hopes identical to our own
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Summary: Plotless? Yes, but so is life...
Review: Commentator Dick Oliver faults the book for having no strong plot elements - but that's exactly why this book is so revolutionary.
You can take or leave all of the characters, situations, actions and locations because they don't really matter to "China Mountain Zhang." What's really happening here is one of those exceedingly rare stories that reads like real life - the main characters move and grow throughout the book, never knowing exactly what's going to happen next. By the end of the book the characters are older, more mature, more confident, and you have come to care about China Mountain very deeply. No dragons have been slain, no worlds saved - just life and living the best one can. Does this mean his story is over? Not at all. You know life will go on.
This is a book that screams for a sequel.
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Summary: I cared deeply for these characters
Review: Despite a virtual lack of plot or action, and despite the constant change of location, I thoroughly enjoyed Maureen F. McHugh's vision of the future... the homophobia of Communist regimes and other oppressive mind-sets helped create the dramatic tension for Zhang's character. However, I understand... rejecting this book for stepping so far away from formulaic scifi storytelling. This isn't "paint-by-numbers" or "insert flap A into slot B." It's imaginative writing from an author who obviously cares more about language and character than about writing something that most creative writing classes would use as a model for "proper" novel structure. I cared deeply about these characters, perhaps even more for the sympathetic and mistreated San-xiang than for the narrator, but certainly for him as well.
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Summary: A very Believable & Human extrapolation of the Future
Review: Don't take at all seriously any of the reviewers negative comments -- just remember the bell curve, the average person has only average intellectual capacity, avg. empathy, avg. artistic sensibility. This book is a delightful, intelligent, amazing, creative work. I loved reading it. You will too, unless you are crass, unimaginative, shallow and really dumb. Or perhaps it is simply not to your taste, huh?
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Summary: SF As High literature
Review: For the first time since I sturted to read SF (20 years and houndreds boks ago), I encounter a book in which the SF is but the media through which the writer expreses. SF as mean and not as an end. This title shold be classified under Literature.
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Summary: Over-hyped, plotless and ultimately pointless
Review: Harlan Ellison raved about this book on the Sci-Fi channel when it came out, calling it the best book he'd read that decade. Harlan is well known for his enthusiasms, but something is missing here. I don't know if he and I read the same book because he's much smarter than I am and I didn't like the book at all. What's extraordinary is that the book has no plot and it has two graphic male... "love" scenes that serve no point other than they fill space. They certainly don't advance or enhance the story, what little there is of it, and it tells us nothing about the character of China Mountain Zhang other than he likes boys and not girls. I don't know anyone who personally liked the book, but Tor apparently did. They published it, after all. But I've no more interest in the author because of this book. She can have my money, but she can't have any more of my time.
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Summary: Loud exclamations from my reading room disturbed my cat.
Review: Highly enjoyable character portraits painted with a fine camelhair brush. Within a few pages, I was 'jacked' into this book much like the groupies that jacked into the experiences of the gladiator-kite-cyborgs that raced to live. The scenes and the science are painted carefully but not so completely as to dilute the reader's curiosity. Ms. McHugh is in danger of being sent to Mars to tend goats by the distinct-plot-demanders. But the tapestry of this plausible future populated by plausible beings is quite plausibly complete in itself. This book succeeds and that bodes well for my reading future.
Rating: 
Summary: Almost a classic!
Review: I have read nearly all the great sci-fi classics (and certainly everything that has ever been awarded a Hugo or Nebula) and for 200 pages or so China Mountain Zhang was up there with the best of them. However, with 40 or so pages to go I knew something was wrong. Call me simple, but don't all novels have to have an ending? Even novels that are intended to be a series need an ending. China Mountain Zhang has none. Further, a number of the sub-plots following the lesser characters in the novel are never adequately tied into the main character. Ultimately, I suspect a sequel was intended. But if so, where is it? CMZ was first published in 1992 so if a sequel ever does materialise I suspect many of us will have to re-read CMZ to make sense of it all.
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