China Candid: The People on the People's Republic

By Ye Sang

Book Overview

Leading Chinese journalist Sang Ye follows his successful book Chinese Lives with this collection of absorbing interviews with twenty-six men, women, and children taking the reader into the complex realities of the People's Republic of China today. Through intimate conversations conducted over many years, China Candid provides an alternative history of the nation from its founding as a socialist state in 1949 up to the present. The voices of people who have lived under--and often despite--the Communist Party's rule give a compelling account of life in the maelstrom of China's economic reforms--reforms that are being pursued by a system that remains politically rigid and authoritarian. Artists, politicians, businessmen and -women, former Red Guards, migrant workers, prostitutes, teachers, computer geeks, hustlers, and other citizens of contemporary China all speak with frankness and candor about the realities of the burgeoning power of East Asia, the China that will host the 2008 Olympics. Some discuss the corrosive changes that have been wrought on the professional ethics and attitudes of men and women long nurtured by the socialist state. Others recall chilling encounters with the police, the law courts, labor camps, and the army. Providing unique insight into the minds and hearts of people who have firsthand experience of China's tumultuous history, this book adds invaluable depth and dimension to our understanding of this rapidly changing country.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520245148
• ISBN13: 9780520245143
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 363 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A great compilation of slices of life in China since economic reform

I really enjoyed reading the little interviews in this book. There is a very wide range of people included, from common street hustlers and prostitutes to entrepreneurs and policemen, and there is even an interview with a Beijing executioner. The sum total of the work is hard to pin down, but I think what is most valuable to take from it is that the economic transition and overall changes taking shape in China in the past 20 years have effected many people in many different ways, some good some bad, and that just because China is economically open and generally prosperous doesn't mean the people are all rosy-eyed and loving every minute of it. Even the well-to-do, and connected insiders are frustrated with the government's penchant for red tape but feel powerless to change it, and the economic openness that has brought many new wealth is also seen as a double-edged sword that has brought about a Wild-West kind of materialism, selfishness and detachment from one's neighbors.