An overnight cult hit, Wei Hui’s cherished first novel catapulted her to international fame. It sounds like every writer’s dream, but the author, who has just signed a deal for the film rights, could be forgiven for hoping that her second novel doesn’t gather as much attention as its predecessor.

Her debut, Shanghai Baby, featuring scenes of drug taking, masturbation and toilet-cubicle coupling, made her a public enemy of the government in her native China. The everyday story of Coco, a sexually uninhibited city girl with a penchant for philosophising like a Francois Sagan heroine before throwing herself into shopping and bar-hopping was banned for being “pornographic and immoral in nature”. The Chinese authorities publicly burnt 40,000 copies, closed her publishers and ensured that her name could not be searched on the internet.

The rights were snapped up by publishing houses across the globe and pirate copies flooded in to China. Five years later this unlikely political dissident is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today to discuss her sequel, Marrying Buddha.

A beguiling combination of wild party girl and zen tranquillity, 30-year-old Wei Hui is happy to admit her first novel has not aged well; the speed of change in China is such that the social and sexual mores she was rebelling against in Shanghai Baby have changed beyond recognition. “The things that shocked in my book are mainstream now.”

Today China faces new problems, namely a rocketing suicide rate among the young, unemployment, outbreaks of violence and a widening gap between rich and poor and urban and rural communities.

“Shanghai is growing so fast. It is hot. Everyone wants a piece of it. Inevitably some people get left behind. Urban life carries so much materialism and desire. It’s very easy to get lost,” she says.

If China’s economic and social development in the past decade has been remarkable, the revolution in sexual mores is breathtaking. A 2003 survey found that nearly 70% of young Chinese were not virgins when they married; only 15 years earlier, that figure was 16%. Chinese women are marrying later and now make up almost half of all university students. This independence has brought confidence and social and sexual liberation, which Wei Hui examines in her latest novel.

Marrying Buddha has a Sex and the City feel to it, not least because the protagonist has relocated to New York. It has a philosophical depth absent from its predecessor, something Wei Hui puts down to getting older. “If the book didn’t have slices of wisdom I’d just get lumped in as chick lit or be called an oriental Bridget Jones,” says Wei Hui.

As in the first book, Coco finds herself torn between two very different men. Flitting between New York and Shanghai, as Wei Hui herself does now, Coco winds up pregnant and unsure who the father is.

The author has what most young single women would consider a charmed existence, dividing her time between Shanghai and New York. “I love this East-West life that I’m living. It means I have to constantly switch between the two codes. The differences fascinate and inspire me.”

As an only child, she recalls a loving but strict upbringing. Things changed at university, where she discovered the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and Henry Miller. She began to write short stories.

Looking back, Wei Hui says she was “an angry young kid” when she wrote Shanghai Baby, which spawned a whole new genre of provocative literature by young Chinese women. But she adds that she was genuinely surprised at the outcry.

Marrying Buddha represents her rehabilitation in her homeland. She has had to make some fairly dramatic changes to get it past the censors, but it clearly means a lot to the one-time rebel to be welcomed back. “Yes, I had to change the title, the cover and some content. But I’m back in China, that’s the most important thing,” she reflects. “I have a strong faith in China’s future.”

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