Review Excerpt:

Yan leads the readers into a labyrinth of "phoney" things: freelance journalists from phantom newsgroups, flashing cameras that produce no photograph, Chinese equivalent of the Potemkin villages, soy sauce made from human hair (this is actually true), magnificent building projects that are never completed, fake documents and identities for everyone, prostitutes presented as virgins with a university degree -- it almost seems that the food consumed in the banquets is the only substantial thing in the decadent city. And journalism is nothing but propaganda.