This article argues that the great disparity between cities and the country has been manifested in literary works at the turn of the century. The disparity does not only refer to the physical distance in the space between urban and rural areas, nor does it only refer to the gap in modernization and material life between the two areas, but rather refers to the potential cultural problems of the underdeveloped rural areas as a whole, which are still the most essential, cultural problems in the Chinese countryside. In contemporary China, there are two senses of time concerning culture: one is the sense of speed in modern cities, and another is the sense of comparatively stable, very slow and traditional time in rural areas. This has been effectively expressed in recent novels as contradictions and oppositions between the pre-modern and the modern. The crisis that the Chinese countryside is facing in the process of modernization, if seen from another perspective, is again the serious problems that modern society needs to solve.