IF you want to know about the nitty-gritty of life in Beijing - everything from what an ID card looks like to the official registration forms governing the arrest of transient beggars - this book is for you.
The collection of articles and reports drawn mostly from Chinese sources takes in subjects as diverse as analysis of the tattoos favoured by mainland criminals and the ways in which the country's new and old architecture relate to notions of social hierarchy.
Australian academic Michael Dutton, an authority on the mainland's police and justice system, interweaves these down-to-earth extracts and snippets with his own illuminating quotations drawn from all manner of Western academics and thinkers.
A section on the cult of Chairman Mao Zedong badges, for instance, has a preamble drawing on French theorist Michel de Certeau's ideas. It looks at de Certeau's work, The Writing Of History, which analysed the art of hagiography.
A study of consumerism in the mainland and youth culture borrows from the ideas of French literary theorist Julia Kristeva and the German philosopher Theodor Adorno.
The book is an anthology similar to the pioneering work of two other Australian sinologists, Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin, who produced New Ghosts, Old Dreams, a collection of dissident writings, which in turn was based on Barme's earlier influential anthology Seeds Of Fire.
This tour, through the cultural landscape of China, focuses less on the leading lights of mainland intelligentsia but illustrates the lives of street traders, migrant workers, peasant maids, homosexuals and others further down the social scale.
