On the prospects for the future of his country, Yang is warily optimistic. Quoting Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, he warns that where ideas are concerned the crowd is always several generations behind, and that a genuine democracy in China will not come soon. Today all right-thinking folk want China to lunge forward to a full democracy, but Yang is not among them: "An overnight imposition of democracy combined with the radical actions of anarchists could cause a weak regime to lose its ability to control society and allow the emergence of a new dictator — because autocracy is the most effective means of restoring order out of chaos."

Wise words from a courageous man, who still lives in Beijing. His book is of course banned in China, yet, for all our complaints about it, Chinese censorship is not remotely what it was in the past, and like Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao, in time Yang's work will filter in and permeate the country's elites, the Communist Party included. The result, it must be hoped, will be to make any leap back to its poisoned past less likely.