While Charles Kupchan and I share common aspirations for a more flexible and inclusive global order, we clearly differ in our understanding of contemporary China. This difference is about far more than facts. Rather, it reflects a fundamental disagreement about the nature and identification of sociopolitical change itself.

When Kupchan describes what “China” is or is not doing, he is referring to the Communist party-state, and discussing it not only as if it were a purposive, unitary whole but also as if it represented the totality of “China.” Hence, in his effort to refute my argument, he asserts that the state, or the CCP, or “China” censors the media, persecutes dissenters, expands the military, and antagonizes neighbors. While accurate, those claims represent neither the totality of Chinese behavior nor the full scope of China's sociopolitical change process. Instead, they pertain to the typical behaviors of authoritarian regimes across time, including, as I point out in my book, the governments that ruled South Korea and Taiwan even at the final stages of their nations' respective democratization processes. Authoritarian abuses are not to be overlooked or condoned. But nor does their existence confirm, ipso facto, the absence (or presence) of progressive change.

When many of us talk about the “West,” including Professor Kupchan in his book, and including myself, frankly, we find it natural to think about change in terms of interactions among societal interests, individual activists, ideologies, religious values, and political institutions. My book argues that, because of the manner by which Chinese society has engaged the global economy, time has led to an understanding of change in China in comparable terms. The party-state is unquestionably still a major force in Chinese society. But we now witness even within that state an extraordinary pluralization of voices, interests, and loyalties: managers of state-owned enterprises who work hand in hand with global capital, overseas-trained academics who run state universities, independently wealthy entrepreneurs who finance educational experiments in the countryside or publicly complain about environmental degradation, and so on. Even ordinary citizens have become increasingly emboldened to articulate their wants and needs, sometimes in the form of vitriolic nationalism, but sometimes, too, in the form of public “gotcha” revelations about governmental hypocrisy in the face of widely promulgated official standards for accountability. None of these behaviors were evident—or even imaginable—10, 20, or 30 years ago.

As a result, when discussing where China is heading, foreign and Chinese observers alike find it increasingly difficult to define what (or who) we mean when we refer to “China.” Are we talking about the state, and if so, which one—central or local? Are we talking about official policy, and if so, policy as formally pronounced, or policy as actually practiced on the ground? And who exactly are the relevant actors now? More than just matters of academic debate, these are issues that are being contested on a daily basis in Chinese society. An expanding array of actors—both within the state and beyond—is scrambling to fill in the blanks and clarify these newly opened chasms of ambiguity. That they are indicates dramatic, and at least in my view, progressive systemic change.