UCLA political scientist Richard Baum is interviewed by Five Books about the top books he recommends that look at obstacles to China’s reform:
What’s your sense of where the whole thing is headed?
I’m caught between these bookends that I described earlier. Some days I wake up and I think Minxin Pei
has got it right, and other days I think Dali Yang
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. Maybe China does have a shot at emerging from all of this with a coherent political system that is not recognisably democratic in the Western sense. Maybe a kinder, gentler version of neo-Confucian paternalism can soften the iron fist of Leninism without forcing the party-state to relinquish its power monopoly. But I have my doubts that the current, corrupted relationship between political Leninism and bureaucratic capitalism is tenable in the long run.
