The Golden Road describes a young man of humble urban origins in China's lower Yangzi Valley who foresees the opportunities for wealth and position in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's "reform and opening up" policies and who then over the next twenty years creates a diversified business empire. This novel thus tells of the reemergence in China of a dynamic, often reckless and shady, commercial class during the momentous transformation of that country during the Deng Xiaoping era. Business people used many tricks as well as connections with the local power structure to survive and succeed in the fiercely competitive business world of China in the 1980's and 1990's. However, quite apart from presenting a picture of the roiling business world of post-Maoist China, The Golden Road is a bildungsroman of a young man's coming of age and his education in life through his successive relationships with four beautiful, talented, but indeed very different, women and the effect they had on him. As Harvard Professor of Chinese Literature, David Der-wei Wang writes in his incisive foreword to this book, the author, Zhang Da-Peng has made a significant contribution to the relatively new (by the timeline of Chinese literature) but vibrant tradition of Chinese novels portraying the endeavors of businessmen and their interactions with society in times of major social change.