When 20-year-old Guo Jingming published his first novel Enchanted City, in 2003, a myth was immediately created. The symbols communicated both by the novel and by the author provoked a deep identification among the readers, who were, for the most part, middle and high school students of the urban middle stratum. Guo Jingming, as many were to proclaim, had given representation to the sensibility of a whole generation. But what were the specific conditions that spurred the emergence of such a sensibility? What was the social dimension that lay beneath the construction of Guo Jingming’s myth? In order to answer these questions, my essay interprets Guo Jingming’s parable in the framework of the material and ideological reality of the “socialist market economy.” It does so, firstly, examining the circumstances that contributed to constitute the subjectivity of the first generation of urbanites who were born under the “one-child policy” and attended the competitive and selective national school system. Secondly, it seeks to reconstruct the parable of Guo Jingming as a writer and a phenomenon of mass culture, who, being produced and promoted by the Chinese culture industry, contributed in turn to the dissemination and promotion of the “new” dominant ideology of the Chinese “socialist market.”