Popular fiction can be a fairly reliable indicator of changing public sentiments. One harbinger that the Cold War was beginning to wind down was the appearance of the now-famous police procedural novel. Such novels challenged the spy thriller genre, which had dominated fiction about the Soviet Union for the previous three decades.
In 1981, a year before former U.S. President Ronald Reagan made his famous "evil empire" speech denouncing the Soviet Union, Martin Cruz Smith published "Gorky Park," the story of a Russian cop trying to track down a murderer. Praised for its originality, it soon climbed to the best-seller list and wound up being made into a film starring William Hurt and Lee Marvin.
While the United States had established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, it took mystery authors awhile to develop decent stories about cops on the beat in People's China. As late as 1986, Charlotte Epstein's "Murder in China" merely refers to the investigator in her story as "the officer" and doesn't even give him a speaking role.