The book investigates modern Chinese literature and culture through the lens of disability. Disabled characters are ubiquitous in modern Chinese literature and serve compelling political and aesthetic purposes. The book traces China’s cultural obsession with disability to the ideology of “ablenationalism,” which upholds able-bodiedness as the paradigm of the ideal citizen while exploiting disability narratives to help address the nation’s recurrent moral and political crises. The excessively corporeal and often spectacularized embodiment of disability in ablenationalist narratives conceptually and aesthetically challenges how a culture defines what it means to be human. Critiquing the presence of the ablenationalist gaze behind disability representations, the book develops a genealogy of “Chinese crip figures,” ranging from the madman in Lu Xun’s fiction to the autistic boy in post-Mao cinema and the disabled poet in the age of internet literature. Discussing translation, cross-cultural politics, and global disability justice, the book also uses the case of “Chinese crip literature” to join debates in world literature. By doing so, it makes original contributions to literary and cultural studies, comparative literature, disability studies, and Chinese studies.