From the Publisher

An intimate, groundbreaking account of a society in turmoil, Out of Mao's Shadow is the most important book about the Chinese people and their fight for greater freedom.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

It is Mr. Pan's achievement in Out of Mao's Shadow that he makes the dark side of China's glittering economic growth palpably real to the reader by showing the fallout of these changes on the lives of individual citizens, just as he shows the potent effect that a few brave individuals—speaking up on behalf of civil liberties, freedom of the press and government accountability—can have on the party's conduct of day-to-day business. Fluent in Chinese, Mr. Pan crisscrossed the country, from Beijing to booming cities and dismal mines in the south to aging factories in the northeast. He interviewed artists, workers, peasants, journalists and entrepreneurs, and his portraits of these people possess both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel.

Publishers Weekly

Ex-Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Pan focuses these 11 profiles on China's lonely dissidents: a filmmaker documents a Mao-era dissident who wrote a prison manifesto in her own blood; a doctor acclaimed for blowing the whistle on the SARS epidemic is arrested for writing about the Tiananmen Square massacre; an editor tests the party's tolerance for muckraking. These narratives show China's social and political tensions playing out through personal enmities, petty bribery and subtle moral compromises. Pan's stirring reportage shows that, even in China, the individual can make a difference-at a price. B&w photos. (June)

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