“Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature” and other pejorative terms coined by May Fourth iconoclasts have tended to obscure the major differences between works of 20th-century Chinese popular fiction. Along with switching to less dismissive terms such as tongsu xiaoshuo, critics can underline the dynamism of this body of writings by linking its close connection to serial publication in newspaper literary supplements [fukan]. The diversity of popular fiction may be illustrated by categorizing works along a spectrum of possibilities in four quadrants, from an idealistic tenor at one end of the horizontal spectrum to a cynical tone at the other, and from a strongly traditional Chinese aesthetic structure at one end of the vertical spectrum to a Western or other foreign aesthetic structure at the other. This paper argues that the combination of idealism and a traditional aesthetic has tended to be the strongest current of this century’s popular fiction, and is common among writers as far apart in time and sensibility as Zhang Henshui and Jin Yong. However, the detective fiction of Sun Liaohong and many others is strongly Western in its aesthetic while tending towards idealism in tone, except among a relatively small contingent of hardboiled crime novelists. Eileen Chang’s domestic novels about embittered wives are quite traditional aesthetically and yet strongly ironic or even cynical in tone. In contrast, contemporary popular fiction by writers such as Wang Chen-ho often leans strongly toward the poles of both Western aesthetics and cynicism in tone.