Sherman Cochran is Hu Shih Professor of Chinese History at Cornell University. His book Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (2006), won the Levenson Prize from the Association of Asian Studies as the best book published that year on any aspect of China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies, University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many article-length studies of Chinese film, co-editor of New Chinese Cinemas (1994) and From Underground to Independent (2006), and associate producer of a two-hour documentary film entitled The Mao Years, 1949-1976 (1994).