China, Scrutable

Every once in a while comes a book to stir your slumber, and this is one. It is about the New China, and just how new it is—how decent or promising. Ethan Gutmann set out to work in Beijing full of enthusiasm. (This was in the late 1990s.) He was a believer in “the power of free enterprise to transform societies,” and, besides, he had “the China bug.” He was not a naïf, mind you. He disregarded the “China optimists,” who “pointed to the incremental evolution of the ruling Communist Party as if this justified unrestrained engagement,” and also the “exiled Chinese dissidents,” who “held that the system was near collapse and needed a good, hard shove, not economic props.” He would look for a third way. Ha.

To put it mildly, the sadder, wiser Gutmann is a China skeptic—and with many good reasons.

Every once in a while comes a book to stir your slumber, and this is one. It is about the New China, and just how new it is—how decent or promising. Ethan Gutmann set out to work in Beijing full of enthusiasm. (This was in the late 1990s.) He was a believer in “the power of free enterprise to transform societies,” and, besides, he had “the China bug.” He was not a naïf, mind you. He disregarded the “China optimists,” who “pointed to the incremental evolution of the ruling Communist Party as if this justified unrestrained engagement,” and also the “exiled Chinese dissidents,” who “held that the system was near collapse and needed a good, hard shove, not economic props.” He would look for a third way. Ha.

To put it mildly, the sadder, wiser Gutmann is a China skeptic—and with many good reasons.