Out of Mao's Shadow is a must read. Not for Human Rights Watchers and Congressional hawks who make a career out of hectoring China. But instead for those of us who have lived, worked, and studied in the Middle Kingdom, and have come away from that experience with a far more complicated relationship with the place.

Here's the rub: it's hard not to get the sense sometimes that a huge portion of the Chinese population tacitly accepts the current mode of governance. How else can you explain the recent Pew Global Attitudes Poll that indicated that more than eight-in-ten Chinese are satisfied with their country's overall direction? It would be a grave mistake to simply explain this away as a result of a veil of ignorance blanketing the Chinese people; Philip's book could easily have been a profile of ten ordinary Chinese whose lives, and those of their families, have improved enormously over the past thirty years--through honest means, hard work, and ingenuity.

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Philip Pan's book is an excellent reminder that history is not a simple process of nations snowballing from authoritarianism to democracy. And furthermore, that it is dangerous to consider modern authoritarian regimes as temporary phenomena merely stalled in the inevitable transition towards democracy. Many policymakers in Washington remain afflicted with this notion, having come of age during the Cold War and America's victory in it. If Pan's book helps to debunk the closely guarded myth that economic development invariably leads to political liberalization, it will have already made a vital contribution to the debate about China's future.

But Out of Mao's Shadow also highlights, albeit indirectly, another important insight regarding the prospects for democratization in China: namely, that mass, populist movements can also be impediments to the expansion and expression of individual liberty. Rather than ending in stable, full-blown democracies, democratic transitions are often seized and reversed by political entrepreneurs who fill the societal vacuums that exist under dictatorship. This point is reinforced by Orville Schell's insightful comments regarding the underdetermined goals of Chinese development.

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Philip Pan’s book is an excellent reminder that history is not a simple process of nations snowballing from authoritarianism to democracy.  And furthermore, that it is dangerous to consider modern authoritarian regimes as temporary phenomena merely stalled in an inevitable transition towards democracy.  Many policymakers in

It’s Friday night in Beijing and I’ve just returned from a stroll through Tiananmen Square. I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on what things look like from this side of the Pacific.

Principally, I’d like to echo Naazneen’s comments that China could be a force for good in the world, and caution against analyses that dismiss this possibility outright.

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Several of the preceding posts have made the important point that, rather that being wooed by China’s ‘charm’, a number of countries in the developing world will begin, if they have not already begun, to backlash against China’s foreign policies. The argument goes that as China becomes increasingly entangled overseas, it will use its growing power to push, prod, and coerce foreign governments. And to the extent that those governments are relatively oppressive and their people deprived, affected populations will blowback against the Chinese.

It is worth thinking a little further about the consequences of an erosion of China’s ‘soft power’.

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As evidenced by the discussion so far, perhaps the most pressing question in contemporary international politics is how the rise of China will affect the current US-led international order. Both political science theory and traditional American foreign policy thought offer the same two alternatives: China can either assimilate to the liberal international system, as exemplified by Robert Zoellick’s notion of being a “responsible stakeholder”, or it can "balance" against the United States, by challenging and seeking to overthrow the prevailing norms and institutions embedded in the Bretton Woods architecture. This is a strongly held, but deeply misleading, dichotomy.

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