In Democracy Journal, exiled dissident Hu Ping reviews Mark Leonard’s book What Does China Think?
Like others, Leonard posits that China’s rise “is the big story of our age and its after-effects could echo down generations to come.” The task he assigns himself is daunting. One should look skeptically at any book that promises to explain how a country as large as China thinks, particularly when it only has 224 pages.
Leonard’s approach is to economize. He doesn’t tell the reader what China as a whole thinks; rather, he acquaints the reader with the ideas of a small group of individuals he describes as the “intellectuals” who are shaping their country’s future. But the dozens of figures discussed at length in the book are all “insiders,” friends, if not members, of the political establishment–figures like economist Zhang Weiying, the first associate dean of the Guanghua School of Management at Beijing University; Wang Hui, a research professor at Tsinghua University; and Yan Xuetong, the director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University. The author interviewed none of the many influential dissident Chinese intellectuals based in China and overseas.
