Professor Mobo Gao is Chair of Chinese Studies at the Department of Asian Studies the University of Adelaide. His research interest includes studies of rural China, contemporary Chinese politics & culture, Chinese migration to Australia and the mass media. He has published several important books, including the critically acclaimed book Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (2007), The Battle of China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (2008), Remembering Socialist China, 1949–1976 (2015), and Constructing China: Clashing Views of the People's Republic (forthcoming).

This is a close study of Gao Village twenty years after the author, an anthropologist and native of Gao village, wrote his original ethnography Gao Village. It combines ethnographic analysis, personal vignettes, and a number of fascinating stories, which presents a convincing yet complex picture of how Gao villagers interact with the outside world. With his sympathetic and insider’s approach, the author argues that rural Chinese display great entrepreneurship and inner strength of self-improvement; they are active contributors to China’s economic boom.