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However, it was not published during the lifetime of its author Cao Xueqin and was only circulated in the form of handwritten copies after his death. In the early years of the twentieth century, the field of "redology" emerged as more and more scholars studied the life of the author and the different versions of this novel. For the past hundred years, this novel has continued to attract scholarly attention, and as a result, its study has now become an important intellectual field.
In traditional Chinese culture, fiction had always been rejected for being too plebeian. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Liang Qichao launched a revolution of fiction that resulted in its shift to the center stage of literature. Unfortunately, as Liang Qichao emphasized the political function of fiction as a facilitator for social reforms, he overlooked an even more profound role that fiction could play in human society and human existence. In the wake of the May Fourth Movement, a movement aimed at enlightenment, modern Chinese fiction became dominated by political and ideological interference. The research on Dream of the Red Chamber was similarly affected. As evidential research and the study of this novel as a roman à clef, represented by the work of Yu Pingbo, came under increasingly severe attack, political and ideological interpretations became the new order. Consequently, the profound aesthetical and philosophical messages in this masterpiece were ignored just as they had been before. In the politicized environment of the twentieth century, Wang Guowei's Critical Essay on Dream of the Red Chamber stood out as the only exception that revealed the philosophical dimension of this novel, a dimension that is more significant than the novel's references to the Jia household, the country, politics and history. Liu Zaifu's Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber, with its detailed expositions of the philosophical messages embedded in the text of this classic, can be seen as a most outstanding achievement after Wang Guowei's work.
In this book, Liu Zaifu's attention is not focused on Cao Xueqin's family or personal history. Instead, it is focused on the exploration of the spiritual dimension of Dream of the Red Chamber. He points out that the male and female main characters in the novel are able to grasp the true meaning of life precisely because they live as "outsiders" to the mundane world and that Dream of the Red Chamber is not only an encyclopedia about the feudal society in China, but also an unparalleled compendium of Chinese culture and Eastern philosophy.