What Does China Think?

John Pomfret

[Leonard] spent two years traveling around the country, interviewing many of its leading thinkers on politics and economics. His main conclusion: China is not morphing into a democracy with a capitalist economy; it is creating its own unique system, with an authoritarian government and a mixed economy. The result, Leonard predicts, will be a fundamental challenge to the West. Leonard believes that bright thinkers—political scientists, economists and grand strategists, many of them schooled at U.S. universities—are providing China's engineers with the framework for a novel political system that blends dog-eat-dog capitalism, a big state-controlled sector and one-party rule. They're succeeding, Leonard argues, where the Soviet Union, also led by engineers in its twilight years, failed.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Commonly characterized as a juggernaut monomaniacally focused on breakneck economic growth, China is actually riven by a lively, far-reaching debate over its future, argues this inquisitive study. Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century) divides Chinese intellectuals into a New Right that wants to extend laissez-faire market reforms and an increasingly influential New Left that decries rising inequality, corruption and environmental destruction and wants a strong government to rein in capitalist elites and protect workers. Meanwhile, political reformers push cautiously for local and Communist Party elections against a consensus that associates democracy with chaotic mob rule or national dismemberment. China's foreign policy is split between liberal internationalists and truculent "neo-comms" who contend that China must be ready to use force against its enemies. The author notes that these ideological divisions resemble those in Western countries, but emphasizes the distinctiveness of Chinese ideas, like the concept of the "deliberative dictatorship" of a one-party state that stays responsive to popular pressures, or a "Walled World" where globalization enhances rather than erodes the autonomy of national governments. Leonard's is a lucid, eye-opening account of China's intellectual scene and its growing importance to the world. (May)

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Library Journal

Leonard (executive director, Open Society Inst. for Europe) argued in his Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century that the American Century based on "hard power" will give way to a European Century based on "soft power." Figuring in that process that China could be either a key partner or deadly adversary, Leonard became an "accidental Sinologist." He writes of smoking Cuban cigars in Beijing and debating with policy intellectuals whose arguments fell into several groups that he labels in the text. The "New Left" accepts the market system but advocates democracy and government welfare programs, while "Yellow River Capitalists" want to let a new capitalist class set priorities. What Leonard elsewhere wittily calls "Neo-Comms" mirror the American "neo-cons." Unlike the first two groups, whose focus is domestic, the "Neo-Comms" push a great power strategy of military expansion, aggressive cultural diplomacy, and hard-nosed international law. Leonard vaunts China's present model of economic growth and political control, downplaying its authoritarianism, but argues that we need to appreciate Chinese debates, which will shape future policies. Libraries with substantial world affairs collections should add this astute and lucid book.
—Charles W. Hayford

Kirkus Reviews

A brief view of China's emergence as a world player, politically as well as economically. In the dawning days of what is now called globalism, it was assumed that China would become like the West as it grew in wealth and power. That assumption was wrong, writes Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, 2005), executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and those who hold to it today persist in error. Instead, China is charting its own course, even if some of its debates and even factions-the homegrown equivalents of the Neocons and the Greens, for instance-sound familiar to Westerners. One is the battle over what democracy means and whether it is right for China, with a sharp line drawn between the Old Right ("who like to talk about the withering of the state . . . [but who] have, in fact, been the biggest beneficiaries of one-party rule") and New Left ("a loose grouping of intellectuals that is increasingly capturing the public mood, and setting the tone for political debate"). Democracy is, Leonard writes, not unknown in China; experiments thrive in the countryside, and even Chongqing, one of China's foremost cities, has become a "living laboratory" for democratic and populist modes of governance. As Leonard also notes, China harbors think tanks whose range and populace vastly dwarf anything in the West-a single Beijing institute, he writes, has more than 4,000 full-time researchers. Yet, for all this thinking and experimenting, the state shows no sign of withering away, and Chinese influence is felt in geopolitics far from the motherland-in Darfur, for instance-and closer to home, such as the repressive regime of Myanmar, backed by Beijing. The overarchinglesson: that China will present to the world its own idea-"the Chinese model"-of what the new global order looks like, and the rest of the world will have to listen. Useful reading for students of contemporary politics and international affairs.