The authors, the husband-and-wife team of Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, who spent their early years in the countryside, described in detail the imposition of unfair taxes by local officials and the authorities’ rapacious seizure of land farmed by rural residents. The increasingly impoverished lives of peasants that the book vividly documented resulted from the very abuses of power that Hu Jintao had declared himself to be against.