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This chapter discuss vernacularization in modern Chinese fiction through an analysis of the vernacular prose in Lao She’s satirical novel Cat Country (1933), using an enlarged timeframe, including the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic in pre-modern Chinese literature to gain a deeper understanding of vernacularization in China in the early twentieth century. In the diglossic socio-linguistic situation in China, the vernacular movement, was not a reaction against the languages of the foreign imperialists, but rather a reaction against the Chinese classical, literary language, wenyan, the major vehicle for traditional culture and Confucianism. The written vernacular, baihua, that developed with demands for modernization and the national-language-nation-building discourse (Hu Shi, 1918) was highly experimental (Zhou, 2011) and influenced by translations of foreign languages into Chinese. However, vernacularization in China was not a case of passive reception of western languages and modes of literary – political communication, thus awarding too little agency to the writers in this process (Liu, 1995), and disregarding the influence of traditional Chinese prose fiction. My study shows that Lao She’s multiglossic vernacular prose fiction, could be seen as a kind of vernacular, “cultural cosmopolitanism from below” (Taraborrelli, 2015), just as vernacular prose fiction in pre-modern times, it developed and thrived due to its close relationship to spoken language and dialect, performative genres and storytelling through processes that can be relevant to consider when theorizing the vernacular in World literary studies.