While hindsight indicates custom essays that the sort of Western-style reformist fiction championed by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao could not work the kind of socially transformative wonders that he envisioned, essay paper this fiction did have some ameliorative effects. For instance, its illustration of more equitable alternatives to custom writing China’s arranged-marriage system did stimulate much debate among Chinese essay writing literati and probably hastened the decline of concubinage and arranged marriages in twentieth-century China. Chinese women’s status in the twentieth century doubtless improved more because of fairer marriage laws custom essay than because of reform-minded novelists’ efforts, but this period’s custom essays unprecedented growth in the proportion of female novelists relative to their male counterparts suggests that Chinese women enjoyed far more essay paper opportunities in this realm than during previous centuries.