THE CHINA STORY

The book begins most poignantly with the Tiananmen generation’s emergence from post-protests rehabilitation to grieve publicly upon Zhao Ziyang’s death.

Out of Mao’s Shadow:
The Struggle for the Soul of China
Philip P. Pan
Simon & Schuster, $16
Pan, the Washington Post’s former bureau chief in China, casts his net wide to find utterances of diverse people coming out of a self-imposed amnesia about some of the darkest moment of the Mao era. The book begins most poignantly with the Tiananmen generation’s emergence from post-protests rehabilitation to grieve publicly upon Zhao Ziyang’s death. Zhao had been purged from the Chinese Communist Party after he refused to order a military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989, and met them briefly, accepting their criticism but asking them to disperse. He was never seen again in public. Among other topics taken up by Pan are a Chinese real-estate tycoon and her way of dealing with her critics and the state to make the most of the state’s ownership of all urban land; a documentary filmmaker’s pursuit of the memories of a young woman who was jailed and killed for outspokenness during the Hundred Flowers Movement when party members were encouraged to articulate their dissent; and a provincial party boss. The result is an amazing mosaic.

Owning the Olympics:Narratives of the New China
Edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan
University of Michigan Press, $26.95
Essays on different aspects of Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics. This is a blooming cottage industry in international publishing this year, with everything about China coming under scrutiny — its human rights record, its rural-urban sociology and political economy, its architecture, its history.