Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

Philip P. Pan

Journalism / China

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.