Average Zhou: a generation scarred by China's cultural revolution is taking charge.

• Author: Frank, T.A.
• Position: Chinese Lessons - Book review

Chinese Lessons By John Pomfret $26, Henry Holt & Company

In 1970, Zhou Lianchun, a 15-year old in Jiangsu Province, China, received a difficult assignment: He was to lead a session of "thought work" against a group of 11 fellow villagers. The problem wasn't the idea of thought work, a euphemism for the torture of so-called class enemies. Zhou had been doing that since 1966, when Mao Zedong had launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and youths across the country had left school to form Red Guard units that set out to eradicate any vestiges of pre-Communist culture. The problem, rather, was that one of the people on the latest list of enemies was someone Zhou loved: Big Mama, his father's wife and the woman who had raised him as a son.

In one respect, Zhou was lucky. During the worst chaos of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1968, thought work often brought death to the victim. By 1970, though, simple humiliation and mental abuse were usually considered enough. So, day after day, Big Mama would kneel on a pile of straw in front of a crowd as Zhou screamed at her for taking in extra money as a seamstress, denouncing her as a "capitalist" and accusing her of harboring a "petty-bourgeois sensibility." Then the two would return home together and Big Mama would cook dinner for the household, with no one mentioning the day's events.

Today, nearly two decades later, Zhou looks back on those times and asks, "How do you think a society where that type of behavior was condoned, no, not condoned, mandated, can heal itself?. Do you think it ever can?" His question reverberates through Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, a book by Washington Post reporter John Pomfret, who was the Post's Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2003 and Beijing reporter for the Associated Press during the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Pomfret has been observing China for nearly three decades now, watching it evolve from impoverished Maoist totalitarianism to wealthy Deng Xiaoping-ist authoritarianism, and beyond. Economically and politically, China has come far from the bad old days, but, spiritually, as Pomfret's book makes clear, much of the poison remains.

Chinese Lessons is part memoir, part reporting. Pomfret first came to China as a visiting student in 1980. In 1981, having enrolled at Nanjing University, he had a chance to experience the country in a way that few foreigners ever do. Rather than being assigned to a dormitory...