Fractality in Chinese prose.

This article investigates long-range correlations in sentence or segment length variation (SLV) within Chinese narrative and nonfiction prose, assessing whether fractal patterns identified in Western literature also appear in Chinese texts. Analyzing 306 Chinese texts—including 95 novels from various historical periods and regions, classical and vernacular works, nonfiction, and randomly generated texts—using multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA), the study finds that Chinese prose exhibits fractality characterized by positive long-range correlations (Hurst exponent H > 0.5). Notably, fractal quality is stronger when sentence lengths are measured by Chinese characters rather than words, and modern Chinese texts show more pronounced fractality than premodern ones. Compared to Western literature, Chinese texts display weaker long-range correlations and a lower incidence of multifractal structures, while fractality is absent in randomly generated texts, suggesting that fractality is a fundamental feature of human writing across genres and historical contexts.