SOURCE: Thubron, Colin. “A Complicated People.” Spectator 288, no. 9067 (18 May 2002): 41-2.

In the following positive review, Thubron compliments Bad Elements as “a wise and imaginative work.”

The Chinese dissident, by contrast to the Russian, has generally been a remote figure—there is no Solzhenitsyn, no Sakharov or Pasternak—and the atrocious penal labour camps which scatter the Chinese landmass are still less known than the Gulag.

Ian Buruma's Bad Elements helps make amends. The political and cultural questions which rage through it are vested in characterful men and women with shocking pasts and largely unheroic presents. The author interviewed them during travels over five years until 2001, witnessing, among much else, the handover of Hong Kong, the early Taiwanese elections and the emergence of the Falun Gong. This thoughtful and many-faceted book portrays the dissidents in their bewildering divergence: wilful, contemplative, angry, eccentric. Gazing through their eyes, Bad Elements embodies...