This book is about the impact of the state and state policies on ordinary citizens, and how individual lives have been shaped and reshaped by the political twists and turns in the People's Republic of China, from 1949 to 1994. Behind the lifeless numbers, statistics, and academic jargon in this book, I want to tell stories of real people – there were millions of them – who lived through a political environment that witnessed major and often volatile changes in the forty-five-year history of the People's Republic of China. My academic training has taught me to be abstract in theoretical arguments, rigorous in statistical analysis, and systematic in presenting empirical evidence, often, unfortunately, at the expense of real people and real lives. While I was working on research for this book, different images often came to my mind from my personal experience when I grew up in China and from the recollections of many others with whom I am acquainted. It is these real life stories that made up the statistical patterns reported in this book. I want to share some of these stories with the reader as an introduction to the context of this study. Let me begin with a Chinese scholar I met in the 1980s. He was a talented student in a university in Beijing in the 1950s. During the Hundred-Flower period, he responded to the government's advocacy to criticize the misconducts of the officials in his university.