Translations were not subject to such strict Maoist political controls as fiction and other literature, custom writing but there were other ways of eluding the censor’s scissors. Uncensored hand-copied novels and stories were widely read and circulated during the Maoist era (1949–1976). Although these popular works were often melodramatic and poor in overall literary quality, they at least helped prevent many Chinese readers from giving up on essay writing their country’s contemporary literature altogether. Furthermore, custom essay the PRC’s lack of control over publishers and writers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and especially Taiwan allowed fiction there to develop along largely independent lines and to improve significantly in quality in these Chinese-speaking territories. Much of this fiction and the fiction of expatriates abroad made its way back to custom essays mainland China, often through essay paper unofficial channels, and became a stimulus in the PRC for more creative custom writing approaches to fiction writing. By the mid- to late 1980s, authors on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were publishing a broad array of contemporary fiction from the “other side” of the strait—something that had essay writing been rare to nonexistent for most of the previous thirty-five years.