China's three decades of rapid rise and its economic slowdown of the past few years have led to an increasingly heated debate about how the country's post-Mao modernization drive will evolve. Thus far, a majority of analyses and predictions on the status of the Chinese economy, the fate of its authoritarian political system, and the strategies and behaviors of Chinese foreign policy have been contributed by a growing number of China scholars and observers in academia, policy making, and the media. Rarely have the views of people with power and influence in China—those high-level party officials, government bureaucrats, policy analysts from government-affiliated think tanks, business leaders from public and private corporations, famed public intellectuals, and renowned scholars in China's academic institutions—been systematically analyzed with regard to China's national trajectory. By examining how Chinese elites think about their own country's future, Daniel Lynch's well-researched new book—China's Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy—tells an insightful story about China's post-Mao modernization at a critical juncture. On the one hand, Beijing's current political leaders, under Xi's leadership, are trying to galvanize their quest for a distinctive political model in order to reject Western-style democracy and safeguard their Communist regime's political legitimacy. On the other hand, they have adopted an increasingly assertive and nationalist foreign policy agenda to promote and defend the country's “core” interests.

Resting upon Lynch's analysis of carefully selected Chinese-language sources—such as internal-circulation-only policy briefs, open-source journal articles, widely read books and book chapters, and governmental newspaper articles—the book casts an important and unique look at the status of the Chinese economy, as well as Chinese politics, foreign policy, and society.

There are some noteworthy research findings in Lynch's analysis of Chinese elites' views. First, there is consistent pessimism among Chinese economists who have constantly voiced their concerns over many pitfalls amid China's economic development and stressed the need for broader and deeper reforms. Second, there are largely optimistic views of, and growing confidence in, China's rising status in global affairs among China's security analysts and international relations scholars. Third, there is a growing bifurcation of viewpoints on the future trajectory of China's political and social development. While many Chinese technocrats and the political and economic liberals call for fundamental reforms to deal with many major governance problems, a majority of Chinese security analysts and political and economic conservatives believe that China's current political and economic systems need to be preserved and consolidated. Fourth, there is robust debate among Chinese elites about how to utilize some major byproducts of China's modernization drive, such as the growing Chinese social network and the development of Chinese soft power to pursue a favorable trajectory for the country's future.

Although Lynch's book documents two strikingly different views of China's future among Chinese elites, it falls short of fully explaining the rationale behind and implications of this bifurcation of Chinese elites' views. For example, the discrepancies among Chinese elites' opinions over China's national trajectory may be attributed to Chinese economists and security analysts' different educational backgrounds, career experiences, international exchange activities, and target audiences. Some China scholars, such as Cheng Li, have examined these factors. In addition, Lynch notes at the end of his book that how Chinese elites think about China's national trajectory is likely to exert a powerful independent effect on the country's eventual development course. However, to what extent does the bifurcation of Chinese elites' views matter in relation to the real-world political changes and economic reforms in China? China's almost four decades of economic modernization have unleashed many unprecedented changes on Chinese society, but failed to bring about any fundamental changes to its authoritarian regime. While it faces a growing number of social and political challenges, the authoritarian government in China has always adopted the approach of “domination-cum-utilization” in order to maintain its political legitimacy and control the political outcomes of the country's economic modernization. To a large extent, those fundamentally different, completely disjointed views of China's future have always existed in Communist China. China's academic scholars and public intellectuals are allowed to have debates on their national trajectory, but there has always been carefully managed political support for the Communist regime among Chinese people.

As China is strengthening its national power and becoming increasingly influential in the world economy and Asia-Pacific geopolitics, topics related to the country's political development, economic growth, and foreign policy practices have drawn an increasing amount of attention. By presenting readers with a sophisticated and comprehensive picture of China's future from a very unique perspective, Lynch definitely makes a commendable contribution to this increasingly prominent debate on China's future. Not only is this book a must-read for China scholars, but it should also be highly recommended to those graduate students and policymakers who want to understand the politics, economy, and foreign policy of contemporary China.