Writing in the late 1980s, literary scholar David Der-wei Wang appears perplexed by the sudden and dramatic appearance in Chinese fiction of what he describes as a ‘pantheon of deformity’ (jirenxing 畸人行): ‘All of a sudden, the ‘Socialist New China’ once glorified by such writers as Yang Mo and Hao Ran has become a dilapidated and grotesque haven filled with souls that are maimed physically or spiritually’ (Wang, 1988: 208). Subsequent critics have attempted to tease out the numerous symbolic meanings of the multifarious ‘deformities’ borne by the ‘freakish’ inhabitants of that ‘grotesque’ literary world, and they have done so to such an extent that one is left wondering whether there was space at all for non-metaphorical representations of physical or mental impairment in post-Cultural Revolution China. Could disability be anything more than a narrative tool in this new age of fictional exploration and innovation? In this talk, Sarah Dauncey examines the way in which the contemporary Chinese literary imagination has used, but more often abused, disability in the search for new modes of expression.