The Golden Road describes a young man of humble urban origins in China's lower Yangzi Valley who foresees the opportunities for wealth and position in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's "reform and opening up" policies and who then over the next twenty years creates a diversified business empire. This novel thus tells of the reemergence in China of a dynamic, often reckless and shady, commercial class during the momentous transformation of that country during the Deng Xiaoping era. Business people used many tricks as well as connections with the local power structure to survive and succeed in the fiercely competitive business world of China in the 1980's and 1990's. However, quite apart from presenting a picture of the roiling business world of post-Maoist China, The Golden Road is a bildungsroman of a young man's coming of age and his education in life through his successive relationships with four beautiful, talented, but indeed very different, women and the effect they had on him. As Harvard Professor of Chinese Literature, David Der-wei Wang writes in his incisive foreword to this book, the author, Zhang Da-Peng has made a significant contribution to the relatively new (by the timeline of Chinese literature) but vibrant tradition of Chinese novels portraying the endeavors of businessmen and their interactions with society in times of major social change.
About the Author: About the Author Zhang Da-Peng is a successful entrepreneur, investor and versatile author in Hong Kong. He established the prestigious bi-annual literary award, the Dream of Red Chamber Prize, to honor outstanding contemporary Chinese-language novels. In addition to this work, The Golden Road, which was first published in Chinese in 2005 by Wenhui Publishing House, Zhang has authored two other acclaimed Chinese-language works: his autobiography Tears and Humiliation (Vista Publication, 2002), and Strategies for Investment in the Stock Market (Ming Pao Publishing House, 2007). He is currently active in sharing his insights on investment strategy and on a broad range of current topics in his daily blog, dpzblog.wordpress.com, which has received over one and a half million hits to date. Born in 1941 in China's wartime capital, Chongqing, during the Sino-Japanese War, Zhang Da-Peng grew up in post-war Shanghai and graduated from the Petroleum Institute in Beijing. After Deng Xiaoping's return to power in the late 1970s, Zhang immigrated to Hong Kong where he built a highly successful business over the next several decades. By working closely with his Chinese suppliers and partners, he personally witnessed at close range the monumental transformation of Chinese society under Deng's economic liberalization policies. Among his many personal interests, Zhang enjoys playing the ancient board game weiqi, more commonly known by its Japanese name Go, and has served as the Chairman of the Hong Kong Go Association. In 2010, the Hong Kong Baptist University conferred an Honorary Fellowship upon Zhang for his exceptional accomplishments and prodigious contributions to contemporary Chinese culture and education in Hong Kong.