Strand, David.  Rickshaw Beijing:  City People and Politics in the 1920’s.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

In Rickshaw Beijing David Strand takes a unique approach to the history of Beijing during the 1920’s.  Although technically this book is a micro-history, Strand’s subject is extremely complex, and the lens he uses is wide-angle, broadening the view of Beijing as well as deepening it. Beginning with the Rickshaw pullers of Beijing, Strand gradually broadens his focus to include their customers, the police who regulated their activities, the Chamber of Commerce, which acted as an intermediary between citizens and government, warlords and presidents, and even Chiang Kai-shek.  By the end, Strand has led readers through a history of Beijing that takes account of the laboring poor and puts them into a society that includes a complicated mix of social classes and “vertical affinities.”  His view seems to be that the society of Beijing was developing a “public sphere”, both in the sense of Habermas’ discursive concept, and in the way that city planners think of public space.  This hybrid public-discussion-on-the-streets-of-Beijing, in Strand’s narrative, seems to lead to the potential for a political discussion that is chaotic and broad-based yet ultimately brings effective, if not efficient, local politics in a national vacuum.  Strand uses beautiful prose and a gift for story telling to provide readers with an empirical set of studies that de-emphasizes the national events and questions of Republican China, and puts the society of Beijing on stage.