Chenggang Xu’s Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism is a work of remarkable ambition. Xu asks why totalitarianism took root in China, why it originated in Russia, and what similarities exist between the institutional legacies of the two polities (p. 3). At a time when scholarship is often organized around ever-narrower questions, he offers nothing less than a total explanation of why China became, and remains, “totalitarian.” The book ranges from the Warring States to Lenin, from Confucian examinations to the Comintern, from Münster Anabaptists and the French Revolution to the Great Leap Forward. It is written with extraordinary intellectual stamina and moral urgency.

Yet the tragedy of this 800-page book is that a work written to warn against the naturalization of domination ultimately ends up naturalizing it. In seeking to explain totalitarianism’s persistence, Xu converts history into destiny. The analytical framework he proposes renders agency epiphenomenal, contingency illusory and reform ultimately pointless. In a moment of global authoritarian resurgence, an account of where domination comes from is sorely needed. However, what Xu offers instead is a civilizational determinism that risks foreclosing precisely the political possibility it seeks to defend.

The book reads as a deeply personal intervention. Xu is unapologetically normative. He places himself in the lineage of “reform advocates” who are “critical of the institutions of the Chinese empire” (p. 10). Writing as an observer of the “brutal reality of the totalitarian regime and its practices” (xv), and as a former victim of imprisonment and forced labour who became a Harvard-trained economist, he castigates the “neglect of totalitarianism in academic and policy circles [that] has allowed the CCP to receive unchallenged assistance from the West” (p. 5). The book’s aim is therefore not simply analysis but warning. While this gives the work urgency and force, it also narrows its analytical aperture. The literature on Chinese authoritarianism is portrayed as complacent and effectively ignored, and the book reads less as a contribution to ongoing scholarly debates than as a manifesto against them.

This tone is mirrored in the book’s structure. The literature review, usually a point of entry, appears instead in the conclusion. Core concepts such as “institutional evolution” and change, which are distinct from “institutional genes,” are explained only near the end (p. 662). The hierarchy of sections is wildly uneven, descending from chapter titles to sub-subsections. The text is repetitive and often circular and repetition functions less as emphasis than as compensation for conceptual opacity. The reader is frequently unsure what exactly is being explained and how particular historical excursions bear on the central claim.

The book’s central premise is boldly stated in its opening line: “The fundamental institution of contemporary China is communist totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics” (p. 1). Totalitarianism is defined as “an extreme type of modern autocracy characterized by total control over society through a totalitarian party” (p. 1), or as the “complete eradication of private property and total control over society through extreme violence” (p. 6). Relying on Friedrich and Brzezinski, Xu treats the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism as settled. Decades of scholarship problematizing this binary are bypassed. The book does not engage with post-totalitarianism, fragmented authoritarianism, adaptive governance, or the literature on institutional differentiation under CCP rule. “Regionally Administered Totalitarianism,” described as China’s “fundamental institution” (p. 16) and one of Xu’s contributions, is not situated in relation to these debates.

Totalitarianism is thus not a question but a premise. The book is devoted to explaining why China is totalitarian, not to establishing whether it is, or how it might be so. Apart from definitional fiat, there is no sustained discussion of what totalitarianism empirically entails or how it should be operationalized across time. The concept is deployed so expansively that it becomes historically incoherent. Maoist mass terror and post-reform regulatory governance are folded into the same category. Although Xu notes deliberations to replace “communist totalitarianism with capitalist authoritarianism” (p. 623) in the 1980s, these discussions are dismissed immediately. China’s totalitarianism is assumed rather than demonstrated. The argument proceeds deductively: China is totalitarian and therefore its institutions must be explained as totalitarian. The end point is fixed in advance.

This deductivism is reinforced by the book’s central conceptual innovation: “institutional genes.” Xu defines these as “those essential institutional components repeatedly present throughout history” (p. 3), where institutions refer to “human rights, property rights, and political power” (p. 4). Genes “self-replicate” (p. 19), mutate or evolve (p. 662), and persist across regime change. They are said to be empirically identifiable, yet no criterion is ever provided for distinguishing genes from institutions, norms, patterns or historical legacies. The metaphor promises parsimony but produces conceptual inflation. Almost everything becomes a gene. As an incomplete list, Xu identifies Confucianism (p. 177), the Russian Orthodox Church (p. 261), junxian administration (p. 124), China’s imperial land control system (p. 124), the keju examination system (p. 124), secret political organizations (p. 261), party-building (p. 48), the Tsarist imperial system (p. 261), personality cults that encompass “culture, ideology, and institutions” (p. 329), parliamentary caucuses and social organizations (pp. 318–319), Marxist theory (p. 319), “individual and private property rights” (p. 395) and constitutionalism itself (p. 432). Organizations, too, have genes: the Soviet KGB traces its lineage to the Cheka, whose “institutional genes came from the Tsarist secret police system” (p. 372). “Gene” ultimately collapses into history. When something exists, it does so because the relevant gene was present. When it does not, the gene was absent or suppressed, only to reappear when the narrative demands it. This elasticity renders the metaphor analytically empty. Crucially, it invites circular reasoning: China is totalitarian because totalitarian genes exist, and those genes are inferred from China’s totalitarian features. Outcomes are not inevitable, yet they always appear as such.

The comparative civilizational argument reinforces this determinism. Locke and Hayek’s thesis on the inseparability of human and property rights is upheld as an ultimate standard (p. 95). Chinese discussions on these issues are dismissed as “not particularly influential” due to their “rather elementary nature” (p. 95), positioning China as structurally deficient and lacking relative to a Western ideal. The Church becomes an institutional gene in the West, where religious warfare leads to separation of church and state (p. 170). In Russia, Orthodoxy becomes a gene enabling Leninist totalitarianism (p. 204). In China, the Church is contrasted with the keju system that “upholds imperial authority” (p. 170). Yet religion also produces totalitarianism, transforming “Christian communism … into secular communism,” where “revolutionary leaders replaced Jesus Christ” and the “revolutionary party replaced the Church” (p. 217). The same gene thus underwrites both democracy and totalitarianism. The problem is not that there is no relationship between them. It is that “institutional genes” lose all meaning when they can result in anything and are justified only after the fact.

The analytical consequence is profound. Instead of tracing institutions inductively, Xu proceeds from a fixed verdict. If China is totalitarian, it cannot have human rights or property rights in any meaningful sense. The task becomes to explain why China fails to be what, in a Lockean-Hayekian frame, it ought to be. Actors become data points in a chain of inevitability. Late Qing constitutional discourse, Republican pluralism, May Fourth heterogeneity, dissidents, protesters, reformers all fade into insignificance. What matters is genes, and genes change slowly. Political struggle becomes surface noise atop millennia-old structures. Not only does history not work this way; Xu’s own reformist impulse is rendered futile by his framework. If genes always win, critique becomes performative rather than transformative.

This determinism is compounded by the book’s isolation from existing scholarship. Literature is rarely engaged on its own terms. Alternative explanations are mentioned only to be dismissed. Long stretches proceed without citation. Between pages 570 and 575, for example, there are none. The Cultural Revolution is discussed extensively (pp. 570–585), yet Andrew Walder appears only as having provided “valuable detailed information” based on “incomplete official local publications,” with no indication of what kind (p. 584). While Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Schoenhals and Frank Dikötter are described as “esteemed scholars” (p. 667), their studies are notably absent from the analysis. Phrases such as “some scholars argue” recur without reference (e.g. pp. 94, 115, 116, 157, 161, 358). The book seeks to stand apart from decades of empirical and theoretical work and in doing so deprives itself of the friction that could have sharpened its concepts.

Institutional Genes is therefore best read as provocation. It reminds us that institutions are not neutral, that political economy cannot be separated from coercion, and that historical legacies matter. This is valuable. But by treating those legacies as quasi-biological determinants, Xu converts history into fate. Long arcs are illuminated, but agency and contingency are buried. A book written to denaturalize domination ends by naturalizing it. The tragedy is not merely analytical. It is one of political action.