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The Promise of the Revolution: Stories of Fulfillment and Struggle in China's Hinterland by Daniel B. Wright. Lanham, MD: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003, 216 pp. $24.95 softcover, $65.00 hardcover.
Not three feet of flat land, not three days without rain, not a family with three grams of silver, goes an old Chinese saying about Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces. Daniel Wright spent two years living in Duyun, a small, gray city in southeastern Guizhou. His stay there was funded by a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs, his aim "to gain an in-depth understanding of life as it is lived by the people." In return, he wrote fascinating monthly briefs on his observations of daily life among different strata of Gui/.hou society. These briefs formed the basis for The Promise of the Revolution: Stories of Fulfillment and Struggle in China's Hinterland.
Wright talked to village elders, proud to have witnessed the Red Army pass through on the Long March in 1935, as well as to their grandchildren, who couldn't care less about such ancient history. He stayed with farmers scratching a scant living from the shallow mountain soil, but found that, in nearly every family, everyone of working age who could be spared from the farm was off working in a city, whether in nearby Duyun or...