Ian Johnson won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his reporting on Falun Gong while working as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing. His posting in Beijing provided the author with a good opportunity to study closely the Falun Gong movement at a time when it was becoming increasingly popular and during the consequent strong repression by the government. He was a first-hand witness to events that may one day contribute to bringing change in China. It is not only Falun Gong that has stirred demands for change; there are other elements in society, however small, which would also like change. In this book, Johnson narrates three cases involving individuals who were brave enough to confront the powerful government at the local and national levels. For a Western journalist, those are tiny examples that can constitute a movement aimed at changing China. Johnson took pains to accompany those ordinary people in their campaign to fight corruption and oppression while risking imprisonment and threats to their lives.

Ma Wenlin is a lawyer who took on the job of defending a group of peasants in Peijiawan who brought a class-action against the government in 1995 after they suffered a drought and lost their crops. The government continued to increase taxes despite the fact that the peasants' income was reduced because of the loss of their crops. What started in one village spread to other places as more farmers joined the class action suit against the government and demanded that they be reimbursed for the illegal tax imposed on them. In some cases they also demanded the return of confiscated properties, like television sets. Johnson traveled to Yulin and Xi'an in search of the lawyer and talked to the peasants. Cases like the peasants in Peijiawan made headlines in the 1990s because of new regulations allowing lawsuits, which were previously unheard of in a communist country. Unlike other communist regimes that collapsed in the early 1990s, China reformed its economic system back in 1978 and abolished collectivization. As a result, the communist party in Beijing was able to remain in power while governments in other communist countries fell. It is interesting to read the minute details of conversations that the author had with the lawyers or the peasants to understand how Chinese people live in fear of the authorities, but are brave enough to defy the powers that be in order to improve their poor living conditions. In the second story, entitled Dream of a Vanished Capital, thousands of residents in Beijing saw their historic city being destroyed little by little by developers working for the government. Those who lost their dwellings in the city were forced to go live in poor housing in the outskirts of the city. The media was barred from reporting on the new property developments. But quietly those who lost their homes began to get together and sue the government. Like the peasants in the countryside, the city residents were doing almost the same thing to protect their lives against arbitrary and unjust actions by the government.

"Over time I began to see in the effort something different: a more sophisticated effort to mobilize public opinion and a slow recognition by Chinese of their vanishing cultural roots," Johnson writes. The early lawsuits by a small number of people were rejected. But the people who took the legal action realized that by involving a greater number of people they would gain strength against the government. Despite threats and questioning by government officials, the complainants pushed on for their rights by putting together small amount of money so they could hire lawyers to help them.

In the final case, "Turning the Wheel" Johnson tells the story of Falun Gong followers who decided to go to Beijing to protest the government for cracking down on practitioners of the banned religious group, which the government labeled as an "evil cult." Here Johnson made use of his vast knowledge of Falun Gong to show how helpless individuals had the courage to fight the powerful government despite laws banning their daily exercises in public places. An elderly woman who took the bus to Beijing from a village far outside the capital must have enough courage to do it. Johnson said the government had a brilliant strategy to persecute the Falun Gong by declaring that it is a "cult" which forced the Falun Gong to defend itself. The Chinese government also used the legal tactics in some Western countries as weapons to crack down on the Falun Gong.

Wild Grass is another example of how ordinary citizens can contribute to reforming authoritarian regimes. At the end of the story on Falun Gong, a woman who campaigned against persecution told Johnson, "China is still trustworthy, we're still waiting." She, like many others, does not want to lose hope.