At the Teahouse Café: Essays from the Middle Kingdom

It's 1949 at Revolutionary University. Chinese students spend all their waking hours in political meetings—when they're not hauling feces from the latrines to the manure fields.

Jump to 2015. Chinese endure endless meetings at the hands of bosses and are required to keep their cellphones on around the clock and pick up at once—or be fined. They live in a technological utopia while enslaved by the same structures of psychological control of over half a century earlier.

Underlying the myth of a...