A fascinating cultural mapping of modern Beijing. Here are ring roads that resemble "successive reworkings of the old city wall"; here is the district for "saw-gash CDs" (imperfect discs dumped by western record labels on the Chinese market), where the young bob for Sex Pistols albums...The book is a useful street-level corrective to received ideas. In particular, its interviews with citizens--an ex-policeman, scavengers in plastic-bag mountains, luminaries of the art scene, cafe owners who dream of being film directors, members of a kind of granny Neighborhood Watch scheme--are wonderfully humane.--Steven Poole"The Guardian" (09/06/2008)

Michael Dutton is author of Streetlife China and the prize-winning Policing Chinese Politics; he is also Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths University of London. Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu are independent scholars.