China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition By Wang Hui, edited by Theodore Huters Harvard, 239 pp., $22.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Noted Chinese literary critic Wang Hui rejects such definitive conclusions about the student uprisings of 1989. With the heart of an insider—Wang demonstrated and was exiled to central China—and the scrutiny of a grad student, Wang recovers this moment from post-Cold War orthodoxy.

By the mid 1980s, pro-market reforms were already signaling the weakening of China's socialist core. To Wang, the students and workers of 1989 weren't protesting the old order so much as one lost in transition; the expectations of the masses were outpacing the state's ability to change. Ironically, the coercion necessary to put demonstrators down became an invaluable tool for forcing market reforms and thus opening Chinese society.

Wang's problem comes when Westerners and Chinese alike misread reform as apologia for the past. Socialism may be lost, he reminds us, but its reason for being will remain unless China and the rest of the world can protect against the laissez-faire injustices inherent to global capital. Wang's intense ambivalence toward both socialism and capitalism affords him space to maneuver—somewhere in globalization's knot of contradictions is the possibility of justice, and the chance for the machine's human fuel and grist to speak for themselves.