Foreword
Pankaj Mishra
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Who Are You This Time?"
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
PART ONE. DOUBTERS AND BELIEVERS
1. The North Peak
Ian Johnson
2. The New Generation's Neocon Nationalists
Evan Osnos
3. Out of Tibet
Alec Ash
PART TWO. PAST AND PRESENT
4. Belonging to Old Beijing
Harriet Evans
5. Another Swimmer
Xujun Eberlein
6. Looking for Lok To
James Carter
PART THREE. HUSTLERS AND ENTREPRENEURS
7. The Ever-Floating Floater
Michelle Dammon Loyalka
8. King of the Road
Megan Shank
9: Painting the Outside World
Peter Hessler
PART FOUR. REBELS AND REFORMERS
10. The Road to a Better Life
Ananth Krishnan
11. Yong Yang's Odyssey
Christina Larson
12. The Court Jester
Jeffrey Prescott
PART FIVE. TEACHERS AND PUPILS
13. The Great Wall of Education
Anna Greenspan
14. Gilded Age, Gilded Cage
Leslie T. Chang
15. Shredding for the Motherland
James Millward
Afterword
Angilee Shah
Notes and Reading
List of Contributors
Credits

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be.
These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires.
Chinese Characters is a collection, as Pankaj Mishra writes in his foreword, "to herald a new golden age of journalism about a ceaselessly fascinating country." Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent to a major Indian newspaper, and scholars whose depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion and an introduction to some of the best writing on China today.
With contributions from: Alec Ash, James Carter, Leslie T. Chang, Xujun Eberlein, Harriet Evans, Anna Greenspan, Peter Hessler, Ian Johnson, Ananth Krishnan, Christina Larson, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, James Millward, Evan Osnos, Jeffrey Prescott, Megan Shank