Five Star Billionaire: Tash Aw on the human cost of China’s growth | Metro (UK)

«Novelist Tash Aw asks what price China is paying as it races to the top of
the world’s economic league table (Picture: Danny Allison) » 

“China is racing to the top of the economic pile but, asks Tash Aw in his new novel, Five Star Billionaire, at what human cost?”

“Damaging though the social effects of rampant capitalism and breakneck urbanisation were in Europe back in the Victorian age, they did fuel perhaps the greatest literature of the day in providing the backdrop to the novels of Dickens and Zola. Now the focus of capital and commerce has shifted to south-east Asia, and nowhere has been more emblematic of the boom that has transformed China over the past two decades than Shanghai.

With its skyscrapers festooning along the horizon, it is the setting for Tash Aw’s novel of the baleful and alienating effects of the bright lights of the big city. There is a definite sense within its pages of a sprawling society of extremes to echo those 19th-century authors.”

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