Significant political reform has accompanied 30 years of economic reform in China. Rules have been created to facilitate transitions among top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). New institutions have strengthened the legal system, increased tax collection, improved the banking sector, and revamped corporate governance in major state-owned enterprises. The regime's core priority is to maintain power. It has attempted to do so by seeking high rates of economic growth, while repressing political opponents, controlling the public's access to political information, and experimenting with democratic reforms at the lowest levels of government.

The government does face significant challenges. Economic development has ravaged the country's natural environment. The CCP has failed to rein in corruption or silence detractors, who communicate via e-mail, blogs, and cell phones. Members of China's middle class have successfully opposed the state when government policies clashed with their personal interests. The next generation of CCP leaders has training in economics, management, political science, law, and the humanities. Is China's future trajectory democracy or upgraded authoritarianism?

Cheng Li and his colleagues at The Brookings Institution invited a stellar group of scholars to consider how changes in Chinese politics affect the country's prospects of democratization. The result is an outstanding volume that considers the question from a variety of angles and contains diverse opinions on the subject.

In the first substantive chapter, Andrew J. Nathan addresses a terminological problem that complicates scholarship about democracy in China, where officials use the term democracy without the connotations given to the term by Western social scientists. In China, democracy implies limited elections and party control over media and the legal system, rather than interparty competition that determines who holds top offices. Nathan considers the views of China's leaders and intellectuals and concludes that they do not advocate a political system that would be considered a democracy according to the standards accepted in the West.

Chinese scholar Yu Keping presents a provocative counterargument. Yu asserts that reforms increasing the political rights of the Chinese citizenry can be understood as “incremental democracy” with the following characteristics: 1) Reforms are gradual and build upon the country's current economic, political, and legal system; 2) breakthroughs triggering qualitative changes take place when appropriate opportunities appear; 3) political reforms should improve the citizenry's existing political interests, making everyone better off; 4) “static political stability” will eventually become “dynamic political stability” in a system that maintains stability through continuous adjustment; 5) democratic reforms will increase opportunities for “legal, organized, and orderly” political participation; and 6) rule of law will facilitate the realization of democracy.

It is easy to understand the advisability of gradualism for democratizing the world's most populous country. Yet Yu's incremental democracy little resembles the messy contestation characteristic of democratic politics in France, India, Taiwan, or the United States, where political processes regularly create winners and losers. Further, the developments that Yu proposes as evidence of China's political reforms—growth of individual rights, improvements in the legal system, proliferation of social organizations, and greater information transparency—do not satisfy even a minimalist definition of democracy, not to mention the Dahlian definition accepted by many political scientists. Is it unfair to discount these political developments as evidence of liberalization that could lead to Chinese democracy? Or should reforms called “democratic” in China be seen as efforts to strengthen the authoritarian state?

Subsequent chapters address these questions, with authors largely falling into two camps: those who see the likelihood of Chinese democratization increasing and those who see the party-state tightening its grip on power. Alice L. Miller examines the institutionalization of representation of key constituencies within the Politburo, age limits for senior leaders, and the succession of top party leaders. She asserts that restrictions barring one individual (or faction) from holding onto power have stabilized the regime by reducing conflict among elites. Jing Huang, by contrast, argues that institutionalization of high politics represents gradual, but irrevocable, movement toward a system of checks and balances and broader political participation.

According to Minxin Pei, the absence of judicial independence, governmental transparency, free media, and nongovernmental organizations permits endemic corruption that hinders China's prospects for democracy. Richard Baum, however, maintains that investigative journalists are forcing courts to make decisions more transparent and exposing the misdeeds of officials. State control of electronic media has become more difficult, as new media empower citizens to challenge the political establishment. Baum predicts the emergence of a more “open and information-friendly China” and the eventual demise of Leninist institutions.

The final chapter, by Chu Yun-han, tracks changes in “authoritarian” attitudes in China and Taiwan over time. Chu perceives a parallel between the drop in authoritarian values in Taiwan prior to democracy and the decline of authoritarian values in rural China. Moreover, he finds the emergence of democratic values in China to be most pronounced among Chinese who grew up as the country embraced market economics, providing a “ray of hope for China's further political liberalization and possibly eventual democratization” (p. 319).

One weakness of the book is the emphasis on state institutions, with scant attention paid to political participation and acts of resistance, although the chapter by Dorothy Solinger does note the implications of high income inequality. The present global financial crisis poses a tremendous challenge to the CCP by threatening to erode the regimes's primary source of legitimacy: rising prosperity for most, if not all, Chinese. As a result, the forces most likely to move the “mountains” of China's political landscape are bottom-up, rather than top-down.

China's Changing Political Landscape is most effective in chapters that focus on China's democratic prospects and less so when its scope of inquiry includes economic and military actors. On the whole, the book is essential reading for policymakers who seek to understand China's future trajectory and is a valuable addition to the literature on China's political transformation since the Mao era.