Becker has been a resident correspondent in China for 10 years, far longer than the typical reporter’s tour, and is now Beijing bureau chief for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. In Hungry Ghosts (1997), he provided the first booklength account of the 1959–61 famine that killed at least 30 million Chinese. In his equally admirable new book, he turns his attention to the China of the past two decades and considers the urban and rural economies, the army, the intellectuals, and the Communist Party and its officials.

Becker has traveled extensively through China, and his anecdotes make the book particularly valuable. In the back of beyond, for instance, he was speaking to people whom time had passed by when a policeman approached and warned that he should not be there. The policeman "is too poor even to afford shoelaces but everyone cringes and falls silent." Elsewhere, Becker interviews a writer who spent 22 years in labor camps. The man describes the behavior of his fellow prisoners, all of them intellectuals: "They lied, sneaked, and betrayed each other all the time. They stopped at nothing to try and prove their loyalty to the Party.... For all their high-flown ideals, they behaved with grovelling servility."

I have never met an ex-prisoner, even one safely abroad, who has voiced such sentiments; anecdotes can be misleading. In addition, some of Becker’s judgments are overstated or simply wrong. He writes, for example, that "China is now a society in which everyone seems to be engaged in deceiving and cheating one another." In fact, one of the more striking features of Chinese life during the past 50 years is how many dissidents tell the truth even when they know the consequences could be fatal. The sourcing is often insufficient, too. When Becker provides statistics on business failures and unemployment, for example, the footnote directs us to his own article in the South China Morning Post. I have no reason to doubt the author’s facts, but I want to know how he discovered them.

—Jonathan Mirsky