Among the earliest scholars to introduce Li's works was the late Swedish Sinologist Goran Malmqvist. In 1986, he translated Hou Tu into Swedish and later Jiu Zhi, Trees Without Wind, No Clouds for Ten Thousand Miles and other works he liked by the Chinese writer.
"I hope that one day I can fulfill a great wish: to go to the Lyuliang Mountains and meet the characters from Li Rui's novels, Trees Without Wind and No Clouds for Ten Thousand Miles," Malmqvist once said. That wish was fulfilled in 2004.
He Ping, literary critic and professor of Chinese literature at Nanjing Normal University, describes Li as "a very important writer in the transformation of Chinese literature from the 1980s to the 1990s".
Wang recalls that in the late 1990s, when the "root-seeking" literary school and avant-garde movement dominated the Chinese-language literary world, Hou Tu stood out for its concise yet powerful language. It vividly depicts the struggles of people on the Loess Plateau in the Lyuliang Mountains, constrained by their environment and fate, but still resisting, enduring, and producing stories marked by tragedy and moments of dark comedy, he says.
Since 2024, the Yilin Press has published a series of works by Li, including three fictional works — Trees Without Wind, Taiping Fengwu (Farm Tools), Ren Jian (Tales of the Mortal Realm: A New Retelling of the White Snake Legend, coauthored with Li's wife Jiang Yun), and two essay collections Yongshi Jiayuan (Homeland Lost Forever), and Bi Changshi Gengjin Yibu (A Step Beyond Common Sense).
Trees Without Wind, first published in 1996, "continues Li Rui's focus on the Lyuliang Mountains, depicting the endless struggle between people and the land, and with nature. This struggle is cruel and absurd, yet it possesses a certain dignity that compels deep reflection", says Wang. It is a work that made Li believe that he had truly surpassed himself as a writer.
The short story collection Farm Tools serves as a modern elegy for ancient farming equipment.
