Carl Minzner's highly readable End of an Era opens with a description of the Three Gorges Dam, the massive engineering feat hailed as both a tangible symbol of China's rise, and as an embodiment of the system's inherent fragilities and hidden dangers. Peering behind the impressive façade of four decades of booming development overseen by a resilient authoritarian regime, Minzner finds another, grimmer reality. Years of exploding economic growth have created huge inequalities in a country that, in 1978, boasted one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the world. The tide of market reform may have lifted all boats, but the income growth being delivered to the wealthiest stratum of Chinese society has vastly overtaken the redistribution of riches to the majority since at least the first decade of this century. In addition, social mobility has declined precipitously. The ranks of the urban underclass is swelling with university graduates, who now find themselves competing with rural migrants for precarious employment opportunities as economic growth begins to slow and falter. Minzner also warns of reverse currents in political development: the partial political institutionalization that once served to stabilize both elite and mass politics during the early post-Mao years is now rapidly unwinding; the central leadership continues to undercut its own attempts at bottom-up reform, spurred by the persistent fear of losing control. This cyclical process of deinstitutionalization has been hastened along in recent years by Xi Jinping himself, who is circumventing rules, norms and established practices in favour of more tightly centralized forms of governance. Meanwhile, far from the centre of power, popular contention remains high, and is giving way to social radicalization. With the technocrats at the helm of the post-Mao Party-state no longer able to contain and channel the swift-moving waters of China's social and economic change, Minzner portends the dawn of the “counter-reform era” that is steadily reversing the initial thrust of Deng's “reform and openness” policies. Given the scale and scope of the dangers he has enumerated, the author predicts one of six possible scenarios: continued hard or soft authoritarian rule; a surging rise of populist nationalism; an extended downward spiral Minzner dubs “dynastic cycle redux”; or regime collapse, caused by either a sudden political decompression or an entirely unanticipated “black swan” event. Briefly comparing China's current trajectory to the paths trod by “East Asian model” developers like Taiwan and South Korea, Minzner instead finds late-19th-century Russia, with its ambitiously repressive Tsarist counter-reform programme, to be a closer comparator to Xi's China.

End of an Era is not written for an audience of China experts. Minzner, a highly regarded scholar of Chinese law who describes his own corpus as consisting of “dense academic tomes heavily footnoted to things such as Gansu provincial regulations on citizen petitioning” that are now “gathering dust on musty, half-forgotten library shelves,” proclaims in his preface: “I didn't want to write such a book” (xvi, xxi). And indeed, he has not. The vivid language and informative anecdotes will virtually guarantee that this monograph will remain dust-free. That said, as compelling a narrative as he has woven, he stops short of providing what is promised in the captivating title: the analysis does not demonstrate precisely how – meaning, by what specific mechanism or mechanisms – China's current authoritarian revival is undermining its continued rise. Instead, the social scientists among his readership will be left with many unanswered questions. By what register is the author measuring China's rise, and its degree of authoritarianism? When exactly, in Minzner's view, did China stop rising, and why? He discusses several critical junctures at various points in his narrative – the Tiananmen crackdown, the shift in developmental focus from chiefly rural to urban-based reform, the decision to welcome entrepreneurs into the Party's ranks – but it is never quite clear which of these events actually occasioned the end of the era to which his title refers. Likewise with the undermining of China's rise: we are warned of the familiar dangers of the centralization of political power and charismatic authority in the figure of a single leader; of the sense of relative deprivation shared among the overeducated and underemployed younger generation who are now openly referring to themselves as “losers” (diaosi); and of how the monopolization of religious practice by state-run “red” organizations drives believers deeper underground. Yet the connections between what Minzner dubs China's “authoritarian revival” and end of its rise are more assumed than proven, and a considerable portion of the book is predictive in nature. The result is a captivating, informative and impressionistic reading of a China gone off the rails on its way to a hypothetically more liberal, democratic future.