Absolutely absorbing! Liu Binyan is showing why he is seen as China's most influential investigative reporter. The book reads like a novel. It takes the reader inside the soul of the ordinary Chinese people. Page after page is filled with images of tremendous dignity and courage in the face of a strangulating system. Characters come alive like the young woman, Zhang Zhixin, who realized that Mao's policies had failed and said so. For this she was condemmed to death by firing squad. But in order to prevent her from having the last word the State cut her larynx. Curt Vonnegut's answer to what it is in the German character that allowed such atrocities to happen in WW2 echoes repeatedly "obedience". Obeying laws that are not in the common good. The spirit of the Chinese people rises high above and will not be quieted by violence. "We will all repent in this generation not only for the hateful words and deeds of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Martin Luther King