What Does China Think?

by Mark Leonard

Overview

An invigorating book about the debates raging within China. We all know about the fast pace of change in this country. This book brings us the ideas being fought over in the country itself – from democracy to the idea of a ‘peaceful rise’. It challenges all of our assumptions about China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007282975
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/04/2008
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	288 KB

About the Author

Mark Leonard founded the leading independent think tank The Foreign Policy Centre at the age of 24, under the patronage of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He also wrote the famous pamphlet, Rebranding Britain, coining the phrase ‘Cool Britannia’. He is now Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform. He has written regular commentary for all the leading newspapers and magazines, has presented the BBC' Analysis programme, and appeared as a commentator on CNN.

Mark Leonard founded the leading independent think tank The Foreign Policy Centre at the age of 24 and is now Executive Director of The European Council on Foreign Relations’. Mark was named by the Sunday Times as one of the 500 most influential powerful people in Britain. He is 31 years old.

Editorial Reviews

[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.
—The Washington Post

John Pomfret

A brief view of China's emergence as a world player, politically as well as economically. In the dawning days of what is now called globalism, it was assumed that China would become like the West as it grew in wealth and power. That assumption was wrong, writes Leonard (Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, 2005), executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and those who hold to it today persist in error. Instead, China is charting its own course, even if some of its debates and even factions-the homegrown equivalents of the Neocons and the Greens, for instance-sound familiar to Westerners. One is the battle over what democracy means and whether it is right for China, with a sharp line drawn between the Old Right ("who like to talk about the withering of the state . . . [but who] have, in fact, been the biggest beneficiaries of one-party rule") and New Left ("a loose grouping of intellectuals that is increasingly capturing the public mood, and setting the tone for political debate"). Democracy is, Leonard writes, not unknown in China; experiments thrive in the countryside, and even Chongqing, one of China's foremost cities, has become a "living laboratory" for democratic and populist modes of governance. As Leonard also notes, China harbors think tanks whose range and populace vastly dwarf anything in the West-a single Beijing institute, he writes, has more than 4,000 full-time researchers. Yet, for all this thinking and experimenting, the state shows no sign of withering away, and Chinese influence is felt in geopolitics far from the motherland-in Darfur, for instance-and closer to home, such as the repressive regime of Myanmar, backed by Beijing. The overarchinglesson: that China will present to the world its own idea-"the Chinese model"-of what the new global order looks like, and the rest of the world will have to listen. Useful reading for students of contemporary politics and international affairs.

Kirkus Reviews