How to Recover Chinese Lives?

Rana: We're all shaped by our circumstances and if you're working in a Western university in the early 21st century, that will bring particular sorts of lenses with it. These are of course, as we've been talking about, lives often exist below the top elite level but actually those are often the most revealing of interesting things. They provide the circumstances in which a kind of self-critical type of history can be written more easily than is sometimes the case elsewhere.