If the long-term stability of a political system requires that its governing elite be both respected and admired, then the bifurcation of honor into its dual components of admiration and respect represents the clearest sign of the de-mystification, and therefore the de-legitimization, of China's social-political order. Prior to the dismantling of the Chinese work enterprise system, its political elites were consumed by an acute anxiety over their own political survival. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was evident to anyone living in China that the average person held its political elite in contempt. The governmental official continued to receive a qualified respect that was devoid of admiration. This contributed to the increasingly expressed notion that the party is nothing but a political caricature, a notion that underscores the public cynicism, contempt, and moral ambivalence toward the prevailing political order.

Hsu's research quest is to identify the underlying cultural principles Chinese use to sort one another into degrees of relative social respect. Because hierarchy is legitimized through beliefs about public virtue and moral precept, exploring how a community conceptualizes moral worth can be an immensely fruitful undertaking. Her research project was conducted entirely in the mid-size northern Chinese city of Harbin, a welcome departure from the field's preference to study China's “more favored” larger cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Hsu advocates (correctly) that a narrative (anthropologists would say ethnographic) approach provides a useful methodology for identifying what Chinese think.

A narrative analysis is a specific type of discourse that is based in stories people tell one another about events unfolding around them. As discourse, narratives have characters, plots, and moral outcomes. In effect, narratives are stories people make up about daily events in order to make moral sense of the world. In times of rapid social change, new narratives are required. Hsu collects Harbinians' observations, disappointments, humor (including several funny political jokes), and life goals in order to weave these accounts into a readable whole. Specifically, she wants to understand the impact that recent economic changes have had on perceptions of morality, and how they shape the culture's notions of social stratification.

Her analysis is in many ways a dialogue with Victor Nee's thesis that market reforms have undermined government officials' political influence and, thus, have transformed the totalizing power of state socialism. Hsu politely disagrees. She points out that local government elites continue to protect their own interests that ensure that governmental connections (or guanxi) remain important aspects of every business engagement. In stressing this point, she does not, however, discuss the other aspect of Nee's thesis that is now accepted by everyone, that guanxi is no longer important for ordinary Chinese who want only to obtain ordinary goods and social services.

It is her thesis that individuals who are continuously reacting to state policies and market opportunities construct a dialogue that over time coalesces to form a moral framework that ordinary people use to evaluate events in daily life. In this way, her analytical interests expand beyond a straightforward critique of Nee's market transition thesis. One of the strengths of Carolyn Hsu's study is its starting point: It is neither top down (focused on elites) nor bottom up (focused on the most marginal), but rather middle up. In focusing on the ordinary urbanite or the urban middle, she provides a clearer picture of contemporary urbanites' perceptions of their social hierarchy.