Review excerpt:

Popular Western writing on China has long followed two major routes. One harks back to the influence of Western ideas and commerce from the 19th century onward and traces the country's response to these challenges: China as a rising power, a threat, a partner, a rival. The other focuses on the less visible but more pervasive array of internal challenges, the peasants and the agitators whose millions of small acts offer an alternative explanation of China's lurch toward modernity.

Two books, Wild Grass and China Hands, are the latest contributions to these two traditions. In China Hands, James Lilley, a former United States ambassador to China, recalls a life of derring-do as a diplomat there, giving a real-life boys' adventure story that will have many grown-ups staying up past their bedtimes. Ian Johnson's Wild Grass is a beautifully spare recollection of three ordinary people in the 1990's who challenged the power of the Communist state in their own Lilliputian way. Taken together these books raise the perennial question: Is it the foreign experts or the common people who will change China more?

Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China By Ian Johnson 324 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.