"Can a professor of Chinese, by peacefully promoting a rational statement of principles of government, shake the foundations of a state that enjoys growing power, boasts vaulting wealth, and rules more than a billion people? Many foreign observers believe not. They see the professor as a 'dissident' and his ideas as a tiny sideshow. But the rulers of that same state demonstrate by their actions that they see things quite differently. They throw the professor in prison for eleven years and expunge his statement from all public media. What do they understand that the foreign observers do not? This wonderful book, a collage of essays from experts writing from a number of angles, is the best single-volume source the world yet has on that important question." --Perry Link, University of California, Riverside and co-editor of No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo