Before the totalitarian reign of Mao Zedong and his immediate successors, never in human history had an entire nation been under such intense surveillance. The Chinese not only had to speak alike; they had to think alike. Traveling to China regularly since 1967, and spending all of 2005 and 2006 there, Guy Sorman saw it all, and in this jaw-dropping book, he documents the horrifying stories of China through the 21st century. He shows how the Party's primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development. It expends extraordinary energy in suppressing Chinese freedoms-the media operate under suffocating censorship, and political opposition can result in expulsion or prison-even as it tries to seduce the West, which has conferred greater legitimacy on it than do the Chinese themselves.
Guy Sorman gives a human face to brutal oppression in today's China. He introduces us to the daily suffering of many individual human lives: students thrown into exile for signing their names to political leaflets, pregnant women beaten for being pregnant without the authorization of the state, peasant families enduring the long, slow sufferings of AIDS brought to them by unsanitary blood transfusions in public clinics. Sorman has long been a promoter of a realistic form of democracy in China and of a "barefoot capitalism" that would begin to diminish the huge number of those who suffer. -- Michael Novak
From the Back Cover: In political philosophy, a whole generation of French thinkers like Revel, Jean-Marie Benoit, and Guy Sorman are rejecting the old clichés about state power and rediscovering the danger such power poses to personal freedom. -Ronald Reagan
