For Miller-McCune, Jeffrey Wasserstrom sums up China books that came out in 2010:
The first thing to note about recent books on post-post-Cold War realities is that some bear the stamp of old ways of thinking. This is to be expected, for influential frameworks often have long half-lives. So it shouldn’t surprise us to hear both faint echoes of Cold War-era Red Menace rhetoric and much stronger echoes of 1990s-style “Clash of Civilizations” fear-mongering in former Nixon staffer turned policy analyst Stefan Halper’s The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century, one of the most pessimistic as well as most stolidly written of this year’s China books. Nor is it odd that there are moments when MIT political scientist Edward Steinfeld’s much better Playing Our Game: How China’s Rise Doesn’t Threaten the West, one of the best efforts to calm Sinophobic tendencies, starts feeling like a sophisticated reboot of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History” fairy tale of global convergence around Western norms.
Among recent books on China’s rise that leave old approaches behind more decisively, a particularly engaging entry into the list is The End of the Free Market by Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group investment consulting firm. It’s a bracing and illuminating read, even if, like me, you remain much more skeptical than the author is about the virtues of relatively unfettered capitalism. The book’s strengths include Bremmer’s witty, fast-paced writing style and refreshing insistence that we avoid the temptation of thinking that today’s China is similar only to other places that are either run by self-proclaimed communists or shaped by Confucian values.
