This book brings together some of the most eminent scholars of the study of contemporary China, with the aim of creating a “well-informed and well-integrated analysis of the challenges, choices, and constraints that Beijing faces” in the coming years (x). Fourteen chapters are organized into three sections: institutions and instruments of governance, domestic policy choices and constraints, and external ambitions and constraints. A final chapter by Andrew Walder discusses China’s “national trajectory” in a comparative perspective. While the aim of the book is laudable, the volume is marred by the uneven quality of the chapters and a lack of tight organization around a single analytical framework and organizational structure. Moreover, the choice of issues is perplexing. For example, there is a chapter on the role of high-speed rail in the Belt and Road Initiative, but there is nothing in the volume about the serious environmental challenges China’s faces.
In the introduction, editors Fingar and Oi set out the central premise of the volume: “that specific policy choices will provide important clues about the extent to which top leaders have decided to stick with, reinvigorate, or depart from the model that has yielded success during the past four decades” (3). Their model of causality, then, is based on the choices made by actors as they try to manage “hundreds of complex, interconnected challenges” (3). The model is nicely nuanced, paying close attention to the factors that shape choices and, notably, to the key role played by contingencies. The analytical framework that guides the book takes as the starting point the leadership’s own stated goals and then asks questions about the constraints that shape policy choices and their efficacy. As Fingar and Oi look at recent developments in China, they see an approach to decision-making that consistently privileges the goal of preserving the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) monopoly of political power and minimizing any threats to the status quo. This has led to decisions to “revitalize institutions and methods from the past” in order to strengthen party control (13), with, according to Fingar and Oi, many negative consequences. Although this chapter is strong, it breaks little new ground in terms of approach or conclusions.
Part one is the strongest section of the book. Three of the chapters provide big-picture analyses of important areas of governance. Alice Lyman Miller reviews Xi Jinping’s push to achieve greater centralization of power, but challenges the view that collective leadership has given way to strongman rule. In her analysis, President Xi’s enhanced role reflects a consensus at the top that stronger leadership is needed to break policy deadlocks, while Xi’s actual power remains circumscribed. Although the centralization of power may inhibit economic innovation, Barry Naughton’s chapter shows in striking fashion just how much effort the CCP is putting into promoting economic progress through a combination of practical initiatives and “utopian-fringed visions” (52). He calls this emerging program “grand steerage.” Naughton’s cogent analysis provides a highly insightful guide to the issues and factors to watch as the program proceeds into an uncertain future. In her chapter, Oi uses an examination of the central government’s effort to rein in local government debt to shed light on the current dynamics of central-local relations. The analysis is lucid and insightful, shining a light on the complex and uncertain effects of the centralization drive on the behaviour of local officials and the ability of the party to continue to create economic growth and dynamism. In the end, Oi argues that Xi’s approach to addressing local government debt has failed to address the underlying causes of the problem and, indeed, has created new instability in the system.
The other two very strong contributions are in part three, focused on external ambitions and constraints. Thomas Fingar’s cogent analysis of the “Sources and Shapers of China’s Foreign Policy” is exemplary in how it provides a useful guide to the dynamics of foreign policy in the coming years. Fingar disagrees that China has become a revisionist power, instead arguing that China has not abandoned its foreign policy approach of the past four decades. It continues to pursue party and nationalist objectives primarily by working within the existing system, seeking to play a more active role in reshaping it in pragmatic fashion. Ho-fung Hung’s chapter on “China and the Global South” agrees with and extends Fingar’s analysis. Hung argues persuasively that China’s “engagement with the Global South has much in common with the motivations, methods, and trajectories of other countries that have ‘gone abroad’ for economic reasons…” (270). As a result, China’s pursuit of overseas opportunities ends up deepening its dependence on the current rules-based order, while presenting numerous challenges that may be novel to China’s leadership, but that are familiar to students of history.
Yet the main weakness of this volume is that it includes chapters which add little to the big-picture analysis of “choices that will shape China’s future,” while ignoring issues that are clearly of vital importance. Quibbling about what is and is not included in an edited volume is often inappropriate, adding little to scholarly discourse. However, the editors state: “we think we have included the most important and consequential policy arenas” (28), thus inviting an examination of their choices. First of all, two chapters on the Belt and Road Initiative are far too narrow in scope, adding little of consequence to Hung’s comprehensive analysis. And a chapter in the domestic policy choices section uses an in-depth statistical analysis of human capital formation to make the mundane argument that the government needs to invest more in human capital development so as to maintain economic growth. These chapters, and a couple of others, take up space that could have been more productively occupied by direct analysis of challenges that are widely recognized as being critical in shaping China’s future: ensuring the cohesion and legitimacy of the CCP, managing challenges to party/government policies, addressing inequality, and preventing ecological and environmental catastrophe. In particular, the scale and scope of the damage to China that would be caused by unmitigated climate change, ecological decline, and pollution mean that choices made in these areas will be the most consequential of all. Scholars of China would be well advised to recognize, in their work in a variety of research areas, the importance of these issues in shaping the ability of the CCP and China’s people to achieve their goals in the coming decades.
Concordia College, Moorhead