Introduction As one of the most cherished values in modern China—in our context, the years between the May Fourth period of the 1910s and the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949—cosmopolitanism was taken seriously by liberalist writers, who expressed their yearnings for universal brotherhood and unconditional love through fictional narrative. The writer Xu Xu (1908–1980) is among the most famed intellectuals of this turbulent era. His “modern tales of the strange,” written during the war years of the 1940s, were his trademark; they were, and remained, very popular when they were published, and they articulate especially well the sense…