Out of Mao's Shadow

Philip P. Pan

Politics

Pan, the Washington Post's Beijing correspondent, profiles dissidents, lawyers, and officials caught between the Communist Party's control and an emerging civil society after Tiananmen. Each chapter is built around a single person whose story maps a fault line in post-Mao China. Collison flagged it as particularly great; alongside Age of Ambition it forms a two-book close reading of Chinese political economy.