Through the accounts of a prominent Chinese villager and his family, the author examines the years leading up to China's Cultural Revolution and its impact on intellectual society. The new material for the second edition shows how this family, and the village in which they live, change as the post-Deng Xiaoping era unfolds in the countryside. The impersonal forces of economic and social planning on the part of Beijing are given a human face and allow the reader to understand their impact on an individual level.