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How does a 19-year-old Red Guard pass his time in prison awaiting sentence as a counter-revolutionary? Yang Xiguang read a contraband copy of Das Kapital, concluding from it that "the labour theory of value is invalid because it ignores another factor determining price - Marx's 'use value', the concept now known as 'utility'. And after reading Marx's discussion of Adam Smith, I say to myself, 'Smith's theory of the division of labour is inconsistent with the labour theory of value.' I decide to become an economist."

Now a reader in economics at Monash University, Yang Xiguang's real education took place during his ten-year term of imprisonment as one of China's best-known "ultra-leftists". As the cultural revolution on the outside robbed a whole generation of a normal education, many of the best minds were to be found within the prison system, and Yang seized every opportunity to learn from and argue with the many extraordinary people confined with him. The details of his debates over the previously suppressed 1950s and 1960s writings of Mao will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in post-1949 Chinese politics, as will revelations about the underground political parties born out of the despair of the famine years following the Great Leap Forward.

While on the outside the masses were restricted to a diet of approved "revolutionary" works, within China's gulag an amazingly rich cultural life flourished. Prisoners' own novels and plays were covertly circulated, copied and recopied by hand and hidden away, eventually reaching a surprisingly wide audience; one of the many ironies of the time, which Yang draws out with a characteristically light touch. He guides the reader through his own process of intellectual and political maturing, as in hours of conversation and debate with his fellow-prisoners he comes to an awareness of the threads linking the mid-1950s generation of "rightists" with opponents of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and with the leftist rebels of the cultural revolution, developing an unusual (for his rebel generation) sympathy for those who had seen through the emperor's new clothes before him and had had the courage to speak their minds. That his own brother, uncle and parents belonged to these previously despised groups adds a poignant personal dimension to his intellectual journey.

Yang's ten-year sentence was for his authorship of the seminal 1968 essay "Whither China?", the most significant document produced by any cultural-revolution faction and one which was profoundly influential in later democracy movements. "Whither China?" owed its impact not just to its startlingly radical ideas, but also to the fact that it was superbly written, and Yang clearly has not lost his touch; he has also been well-served by his translator here. I would recommend this book to anyone, whether or not they are particularly interested in China, not least for the author's inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, self-deprecating humour, and profound human compassion for almost everyone he comes across in the course of his dissident career. This is a moving and unflinchingly honest account of an extraordinary ten years, and shining through it all are the "spirits" of the title, bitter and angry, certainly, at the waste of so many of China's finest and most independent minds, but ultimately unbowed even in the face of death.

Jackie Sheehan is lecturer in international history, Keele University.