American Abroad in China
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Man grows up in China, speaks his mind at the wrong time, gets thrown out of college into forced labor, declines to the peasant class, is re-habilitated, teaches in a college, is published, joins the Yale staff in America to teach Chinese, returns to China and is almost re-imprisoned, returns to America and, to top it all off, watches his son - now with an American passport and new MBA - return to China to take part in the new revolution. The reviewers are saying the book is the most lucid account of a life from Mao's time into recent times.
My read? People are people. If you manage to leave cynicism behind (not an easy task in China based upon this experience) even the worst of situations has a good side.
The book's meaning for the modern manager?
Teams can be effective even in the most constrained of societies. The Chinese experience isn't done yet, possibilities still exist for change, and, finally, those possibilities are still enticing even to folks who we might assume ought to know better.
Reference
Kang, Zhengguo. Confessions. An Innocent Life in Communist China. W. W. Norton & Company. 2005.