The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that the book possessed "both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel".
He started his career working at the Post's Metro Desk "covering crime, education and immigration policy" after graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor's in government in 1995.
He was managing editor for The Harvard Crimson and freelanced for The Boston Globe, and interned with the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Jersey Journal.
Pan's book profiles a dozen individuals caught in the struggle over China's political future, including a filmmaker trying to uncover the truth about the execution of a young woman named Lin Zhao during the Cultural Revolution, an elderly surgeon named Jiang Yanyong who blew the whistle on China's cover-up of the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, and a blind rural activist named Chen Guangcheng who was jailed after trying to stop a campaign of forced abortion and sterilization in his village.
[10] In April 2024, an article from The Intercept revealed that Pan, along with The New York Times standards editor Susan Wessling, had written an internal memo instructing The New York Times journalists covering the Israel-Hamas war to restrict from using terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.