China and the West

Ding Xilin was the only playwright of the modern period who concentrated solely on writing comedy. His genesis as a dramatist can be credited in large measure to the inspiration he drew from the British and Irish writers whose work he had become familiar with while a student in England between 1914 and 1920. Ding once commented that his works ought to be regarded more as translations of foreign plays than as original creations. In the work of Ding and Oscar Wilde, a range of subsidiary themes, including relations between the sexes, as well as marriage and th4e place of women in society generally, and relations between one generation and another, are embedded in one fundamental theme : morality.