Cao Jinqing was born in 1949 in Zhejiang province, Central China, and graduated as a mature student in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1982. He now heads the Sociology Department at East China University of Science & Technology. This book is not his first publication but it is his first major work. It has sold widely in China, but is little known outside China.

Nicky Harman graduated in Chinese at Leeds University in 1972. She currently teaches Chinese translation at Imperial College London, and translated K—The Art of Love by Hong Ying (Marion Boyars, 2002).

Huang Ruhua was born in 1960 in Shanghai, Central China, and graduated in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai in 1982. Between 1985 and 1990, shelectured in Shanghai, and now lives and works in London.

This book, by leading Chinese sociologist Cao Jinqing, has had a major impact in its original Chinese version. Reviewed in the Far East Economic Review as ‘one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside published in the reform era’, the book charts a long journey through the hinterland region of the Yellow River undertaken by the author in 1996. It examines in exhaustive detail the lives and work of peasants, Party and local government officials, providing a wealth of data on the nature of life in post-reform rural China. The author argues that the current economic reforms in China have brought hardship for many small farmers in China’s interior. The latter, he says, are being driven almost beyond endurance by official corruption and excessive taxation; in the past they have frequently rebelled, and he questions whether they will do so, again.