Sun Wei’s writing describes in detail today’s Shanghai, a well-developed metropolis. Her novels mainly focus on the strife, bullying and stress of the contemporary workplace, with characters running the gamut of all social classes, including bureaucrats, billionaires, and celebrities, as well as ordinary people.

Her stories investigate the "malaise" in contemporary China. In the last three decades, the economy has been developing at an incredible speed, which brings both miracles and disasters to people’s lives. Sun Wei is interested in the awkward  conditions people now live under, where they are too busy even to know who they are.

Shanghai born and bred, Sun Wei is adept at peeling off the glazes from the surface of life and exposing the readers to the seamy side of a metropolis, in a way that is both appalling and close to the bone. All of her characters have a kind of split personality; they are incapable of coping with their relationships with each other and are even doubtful about their own existence.