This article reviews and examines the five stages during which postmodern literary theory currents gradually entered China and exerted influences since the 1980s. With a significant amount of empirical evidence

the paper demonstrates that the influences of the Western postmodernism filtered slowly through the field of Chinese literary theory in the process during which Chinese literary theoretical circle did not unreservedly embrace the theories but accepted the influences through borrowing and assimilation

refutation and criticism. The paper takes the essentialist way of thinking as an example and expounds the characteristics of the positive and negative impacts which the postmodern literary theory has on Chinese theories.