Wang Hui took part in the massive student demonstration of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, which ended in a massacre when the People's Liberation Army was ordered to fire on the demonstrators. He was subsequently sent to a re-education camp in the Qinling Mountains of Central China where he lived for what he called "the greater part" of 1990s. Now a research professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Wang Hui analyzed the events of 1989, which he called a social movement that has transformed China and has had a global impact.

Shortly after the Tiananmen Square events, the Soviet Union collapsed and communism around the world declined. For Western observers, June 1989 was a pro-democracy movement. But Wang Hui said the movement began in China years before with the aim of changing Chinese society, which is why he called it a social movement.

Orville Schell, a well-respected China scholar, says in reviewing Wang Hui's essays in this volume, that he is a lonely voice in China, who dares to challenge the Beijing leadership in stating that economic reform is not workable unless it is accompanied by political reform. Schell predicts that Wang Hui's voice could have an impact only if China's so-called "economic miracle" takes a turn for the worse. But essays by Chinese intellectuals about their country's reforms will have no consequences as long as the economic and political situation is under control by the authorities in Beijing. Schell warns rightly that the book is hard to read because of Wang Hui's heavy use of academic and theoretical arguments to explain the social turmoil in China.

Wang Hui's three essays in this volume focus on the historical social conditions in China, the reforms in the 1990s, globalization and China's modernization. He says the massive demonstration in Tiananmen Square was the result of spontaneous popular revolt against inequities created by the market economy. China's reforms began when Deng Xiao-ping urged his country to embark on the road to prosperity, stating that there is no shame in being rich. Wang Hui says economists referred to 1988, the year before the Tiananmen Square events, as the "year of the contract," because the system of contracts was extended from contracts for individuals to contracts for foreign investments, for government departments and so on. Under the contract system, corruption thrived. In 1989, the government announced the gradual phasing out of the communist system of price planning, under which the central government decided on commodity prices, and moving toward market pricing. The announcement plunged the population into a panic buying and social instability, Wang Hui says. During that period, the gap between the poor and rich widened as well as the conflicts between the central and local governments. Public property for example was used by a handful of people in return for money and power. The country witnessed systematic corruption in the 1990s, he says. At the same time, income levels of the working class began to drop with the waves of layoffs and unemployment. Reforms that would bring social benefits in housing, medical care and wages were not implemented across the country.

Wang Hui says the government promoted market reform and social transformation based on the political system and ideology of the past, which created a crisis involving the legitimacy of the government.

He points out that the Chinese media at first reported the Tiananmen Square events, and there was a short period of press freedom and open discussion, which helped to spread the democratic movement. The movement failed because of the government's direct intervention. Ultimately it failed because the movement was unable to bridge the gap between demands for political democracy and demands for social equality, which was the basis for the Tianamen Square protest. Wang Hui argues that market economy would fail in China because it resulted from "state interference and violence" and because it contradicted the socialist ideology of the communist regime.