Guo Yuhua is one of China’s best-known sociologists and most incisive government critics. A professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, she has devoted her career to researching human suffering in Chinese society, especially that of peasants, the promised beneficiaries of Communist rule. Born in 1956, Guo grew up in one of the “big courtyards” of government housing compounds for the country’s ruling elite. Her parents were military officers who served in the central government. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, senior leaders like her father were persecuted; he died in 1968 of liver cirrhosis after being denied medication.