BOOK REVIEW

China is such a vast, contradictory land that the most illuminating books often explore it through an intense focus on a single topic: The aviation industry, the one-child policy, the lives of migrant factory workers. Education is a particularly transparent window, as demonstrated by the perceptive Little Soldiers, which turns over cultural rocks from bribery to the urban-rural divide while delving into the nation’s school system, deeply rooted as it is in both ancient Confucianism and Communist dogma.