Us in a World Out of Order: China, America, and the Remaking of the World is a work of long-form nonfiction that is at once a cool-eyed reckoning with political economy and the solitary memoir of one man.

Writing in the first person, Desolate Isle records the year 2025—outwardly calm, inwardly convulsing—and the violent unraveling of the old global order that followed into 2026. He begins in a dim eight-square-meter room in Los Angeles and moves outward through asylum interviews, detention, interrogation, and the machinery of a state closing in. Once a transportation expert, entrepreneur, and inventor who had worked within the Chinese state system and knew its workings from the inside, he watched his assets fall to nothing—and drove, alone, through the small hours of foreign nights, 1,495 fares in all, to hold off the dusk gathering in his soul.

Across fifteen countries and regions—the United States, China, Southeast Asia, Canada, Japan—he talks, unflinchingly, with some seventy people: undocumented migrants, laborers at the bottom, entrepreneurs working across borders, scholars, a Vietnam War veteran, government officials. With the trained eye of a sociologist and an engineer, he strips the grand narrative of its political dress and turns what he finds—the collusion of the courts and police, the squeeze of state monopoly on private enterprise, the vast fiscal cost hidden behind big-data control—into vivid, unsparing slices of a real society.

This book does not argue abstractions. It begins with the particular human being, trapped in a society of appetite, and by that light makes the structural upheaval of the world visible to more of us. It is a book for the general reader about lives and livelihoods, and a window onto the social and economic reality of China and America, and onto the societies of North America, Southeast Asia, and Japan.

Sign up now to get the most out of Books2Read

Discover something great at Books2Read.

Thanks for signing up for Books2Read notifications!