New Zealand film director Peter Jackson, of Wellington, has bought rights to one of China's best-selling novels of recent years, Wolf Totem, a tale of rugged life among wolves on the Mongolian plains. Jackson, best known for his trilogy of dark fantasies in The Lord of the Rings and his version of King Kong - to be released next month - has bought the story rights to the novel and plans to produce a film based on it, the New York Times reports. The story tells how a young Han Chinese man and his friends steal a young wolf from its pit and raise it in their tent. Written by a 59-year-old political scientist at a Beijing university - who uses the pen name Jiang Rong - Wolf Totem has been acclaimed internationally as a stirring allegorical critique of Chinese civilisation, which he calls soft and lacking in individuality and freedom. [More]