Synopsis
A renowned foreign policy expert with deep connections to China's next generation of thinkers opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution
The Washington Post - 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.