Add more success stories, including the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to France-based Gao Xingjian in 2000, and it's understandable why the number of Chinese writing in, and being translated into, English has swelled in recent years. China's ascendance, accompanied by a flood of front-page stories on its economic and political developments, has made English speakers crave a window into this still-mysterious culture. While best-selling authors such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston have offered westerners a sense of what life is like for 'hyphenated Chinese' living in America, now they want 'to read the real China', Wang says.

Authors such as Dai Sijie - whose novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, now also a film, shot to the top of the best-seller lists when it came out in France in 2000 - are giving it to them. About 25 years into China's open-door emigration policy, there's a growing body of Chinese writers such as Anchee Min, Liu Hong and Ha who have been living in the west for years and writing in English. And millions in China today are studying English.

'Everyone can see China is destined to be an increasingly important force in the world, not only economically but politically and culturally,' says LuAnn Walther, an editor at the Knopf Publishing Group, which publishes Ha, Dai, Da Chen and Yu Hua. 'There's a realisation among more and more readers that there are discoveries to make outside our own borders. I didn't go out looking for a Chinese writer, but when Ha Jin came my way, he whetted my appetite.'

In Hong Kong, publishing and marketing outlets for Chinese writing in English have multiplied. During the past few years, there have been the launches of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival (which draws about 40 overseas authors), the online Asian Review of Books (asianreviewofbooks.com) and another literary review, dimsum (dimsum.com.hk). The local three-year-old Chameleon Press, which specialises in books for and about Asia, plans to double its list this year to 24 titles. Another local publisher, Asia 2000, has introduced two new imprints in the past year: Orchid Pavilion for literary titles and Black Butterfly for mysteries. And in Britain last year, an imprint devoted to titles about Asia, called Muse, was launched.

Hong Kong University Press last year released City Voices, a collection of prose and poetry by some 70 Hongkongers, more than half of whom are Chinese. Co-editor Xu Xi, 50, has had six books of fiction published in English.

Another native Hongkonger, David T.K. Wong, 75, a novelist now living in London, has created a #25,000 fellowship for fiction writers who want to write in English about Asia to spend a year at university in Britain. Westerners are 'waking up to the fact they don't know much about other cultures', Wong says, 'and they're beginning to find out we need this kind of understanding between people if we're not going to end up blowing each other to smithereens.'

Among the reasons Chinese writers give for migrating to Britain are the liberating effect of the language, access to a more efficient and developed publishing and distribution system, and the desire to counter cliched expatriate accounts. The wish to evade China's government censors also plays a role, although it's one that seems to be lessening. In fact, censorship can be a boon: books that have been banned in China - such as the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll tomes of young writers Mian Mian and Wei Hui - have taken off in the west.

Min, 47, the author of the memoir Red Azalea, has written all five of her books in English, even though, she says, 'it could take me two weeks to work on one sentence'. She says China is 'one country versus the world. The market [for books in English by Chinese] has grown amazingly. The world's reading public has developed a taste for Chinese characters and Chinese writing styles. Life for an average American is nice and easy but boring. Books on Chinese topics inspire escapism.'

When Min, who lives in San Francisco, first arrived in America 20 years ago, she started writing in English in the hope of becoming an office secretary. It wasn't long before she'd raised the bar, and figured out how to keep the book contracts coming. 'Market definitely plays a role,' she says. 'If not too much for me, for my publishers. The fact that Empress Orchid [her novel about Tsu Hsi, China's last female ruler] has been extremely well received brought me an offer to write the sequel, The Last Empress. In other words: no best-selling list, no offer.'

Nury Vittachi, the Sri Lankan author of a mystery series and managing director of Hong Kong's literary festival, says the lack of publishing infrastructure in Asia, such as publishers with global distribution systems, drives writers to English. 'The only way Asian authors can get on the world stage is by writing in English or getting translated,' Vittachi says. 'There's no equivalent to Random House or Penguin in China. Books published by mainland publishers may do fine domestically, but they don't end up in airport bookshops.'

There are also few literary agents in the region. 'Even if the next John Grisham or Stephen King is in China, they wouldn't be found,' he says. 'There are no publishers, no agents, no one looking for them or that kind of material.'

For the first year of the festival, finding overseas Chinese authors to feature was a challenge, Vittachi says. 'Now, we get more and more Chinese names coming up, as authors publish in England and across borders.' Among the headliners at this year's festival were crime writer Qiu Xiaolong, who lives in the US, writes in English and, in a twist, has his books translated into Chinese.

'In the past year or so, we have seen a number of important works of 'new generation' mainland Chinese writers released in English for the first time, although they have been publishing in China for quite some time,' says Peter Gordon, Chameleon's publisher, a co-founder of the festival and editor of the Asian Review of Books. Meanwhile, he says, the work of Chinese writers living in France - such as Nobel winner Gao, Balzac author Dai and Shan Sa - is also getting translated into English. 'All of a sudden, there is a lot to read ... and much of it is very good,' he says.

In his role as editor of the Asian Review, Gordon has noticed 'a couple of new books a month' by Chinese writers that are worth 'paying attention to'. One author who merits attention is Liu Hong whose first novel, Startling Moon, has sold 40,000 copies, according to her literary agency, Toby Eady Associates, in London. 'I was so fed up with people having one dim impression of China,' says Liu Hong, 38, who lives in London and uses her full name. 'Writing in English, I can be free. It's not just political, it's personal. I feel I can be almost a different kind of personality. I'm more open, more able to express myself. I'm less worried about what other people [or] my family might think.'

However, some observers say the new body of work by Chinese authors often falls into predictable patterns, just like the expat literature they are trying to counter. 'Most of the stuff that gets published in English is by Chinese women writers, about how hard my life and my mother's life was,' says Michael Morrow, publisher of Asia 2000. 'It also helps if it's about the Cultural Revolution. It doesn't really matter whether it's fact or fiction or something in between.'

Toby Eady, whose agency specialises in books about China, the Middle East and Africa, says he doesn't like to represent Chinese authors writing in English. 'By crossing to another language, they lose so much,' he says. 'There is something phoney about them. They appear to be westernised compared with Chinese authors writing in Chinese, and it doesn't ring true. Their English isn't 100 per cent, and the structure of the book, the language, suffers.'

One of his authors, Xinran, 46, has shown that writing in Chinese doesn't have to be a barrier to stellar sales. Eady says Xinran's first book, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices - based on her call-in radio show that featured women's harrowing true-life tales - has sold 400,000 copies worldwide since its July 2002 release and been translated into more than 30 languages.

Others, such as Wang, experiment with both languages. Wang continues to write books on cultural issues in Chinese - even though, she says, the market is mainly interested in get-rich-quick titles, and Chinese publishers secretly reprint their own authors. Sales of Lili are '10 times better' than those of her Chinese books, she says.

Then there's the censorship factor. For Lili to be translated into Chinese, the ending - which deals with the Tiananmen Square incident - will have to be altered, Wang says. But she persists. 'I love the language because it's my mother tongue,' she says. 'When I write in Chinese, I can sound very uneducated and raw. I can talk about intellectual things through the words of a girl from a Beijing alley, not cosmopolitan, not educated, with a lot of idioms. I like this contrast.'

Xiaolu Guo, 30, likes contrast, too. Her novel, Village of Stone, the first of her six books to be translated into English, will come out in Britain in May. Guo, who divides her time between Beijing and London, is working on two books in Chinese and one in English. 'I don't mind playing the language game sometimes,' she says. 'I like to move around between the east and west.'

With so many writers trying out English, Wang says China is experiencing a literary brain drain. Others say the country has brilliant writers to spare. 'I think the best will stay with Chinese,' Gordon says, citing Nobel winner Gao. 'It's hard to be the best in a language that isn't your native language.'

And in the future, it is China the rest of the world may be scrambling to accommodate, with Chinese sections opening in bookshops in New York and London. 'In 20 years,' Gordon says, 'you might find people like Stephen King rushing off to get their books published in Chinese.'