This astonishing new book by Orville Schell, for thirty years America's foremost chronicler of contemporary China, offers a unique look at the China of the mid-'90s and the generation that stands poised to inherit the "mandate of heaven," the right to govern the world's largest nation.

China's current leaders - already in their eighties and nineties - will soon be leaving the country's political scene. Their departure raises the ultimate question: Who will assume power? The generation that was the natural heir was decimated in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and '70s. Thus, with the end of the Deng era, it is left to a new generation, with a drastically different set of experiences and priorities, to take over.

The crackdown that followed the democracy protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 seemed to foretell doom to international investment and any possibility of political freedom, but Deng Xiaoping, who had already begun instituting bold capitalist-style economic reforms in the 1980s, maneuvered China back onto the path of reform, and by 1992 China had become the fastest growing economy in the world. Yet China remains a place where even peaceful expression of political views is punishable by imprisonment.

Traveling back to China many times since 1989, Schell takes readers on a series of trips inside the latter-day People's Republic to meet the people who acted out the drama of the Square and who are now playing the leading roles in China's high-speed rush into the future.

With the intimacy of an old friend, Schell introduces us to these ordinary and extraordinary characters, not necessarily the children of the elite, as some might expect, but students, workers, peasants, entrepreneurs, teachers, soldiers, intellectuals, labor leaders, and pop stars.

As China's importance on the world stage grows, it becomes increasingly necessary that the West acquaint itself with the "new China" and get to know these young people who must now negotiate a way out of their country's myriad contradictions. With his knowledge of Chinese history and his unparalleled understanding of the Chinese people, Schell is the perfect writer to interpret the changes that will determine the future of this important but uncertain land.