This edited volume is the 2016 fruit of a May 2013 conference. Its excellent chapters are written by a range of superb, balanced analysts from Asia, Europe and the United States. Divided into two broad parts, the book's first section addresses domestic challenges facing Xi Jinping in the opening phase of his first administration and the second focuses on the foreign policy challenges confronting him and his colleagues during the same time period. The volume treats domestic politics as a key predicate for understanding foreign policy. This volume is useful for classrooms at both the undergraduate and graduate-student levels, as well as for professionals.
The 2013 conference convened very shortly after Xi Jinping had been named the PRC's president, adding that status to Xi's titles of Party general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission. The initial drafts of this volume's chapters were written at a moment in which there was palpable hope among many analysts that Xi Jinping's emerging strong-man leadership would allow reform impulses to overcome the domestic gridlock that had impeded reform (particularly economic) during the preceding Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao decade. Since the time of the conference, however, optimism that reform lies just around the bend has receded considerably.
In their Conclusion to the volume, the two editors perceptively define Beijing's core challenge as apparent from the constituent chapters: “Xi Jinping's greatest challenge is the management of the interconnected but frequently contradictory demands of Party survival and national interests. (…) If Xi Jinping gives priority to the revival of ideological mobilization, Party control over the economy and society, nationalism and China's great power status, and seeks to maximize his own personal power rather than focus on pragmatic policy making, China will face increasingly uncertain prospects” (p. 278). This is the future that many analysts now perceive to be unfolding.
The individual chapters are of high quality and each has important points to make. Bo Zhiyue's opening contribution on “China's fifth-generation leaders” highlights the fact that Beijing's new leadership is no longer nearly as technocratic as its two immediate predecessors. Further, because of this current elite's Cultural Revolution experience, “The percentage of Politburo members with no full-time college education is the highest since 1992” (p. 10). In their chapter on “Formal political structures,” Zheng Yongnian and Weng Cuifen point to many of the progressive institutional changes that had accumulated gradually before the 18th Party Congress, but this catalogue serves to highlight how much backsliding has occurred since 2012/13, despite the hopeful noises emanating from the Third Plenum of autumn 2013. In his excellent chapter, Barry Naughton asks the core question: will Xi scale back the “power of the state” to reinvigorate economic reform (p. 77)? Xi's efforts to go after opponents and corruption, however, require an increase in Party power and intervention that are contrary to the needs of successful economic reform. And, when the reader gets to Joseph Fewsmith's chapter, “The challenges of stability and legitimacy,” one sees why Xi has placed emphasis on Party power – because stability, not efficiency, is the primary elite governing value. To achieve stability and popular legitimacy, the regime has adopted three strategies: patriotic education, stability maintenance (weiwen) and a service-oriented government posture, all within the framework of the single-party system. None of these governing responses necessarily provides fertile soil for economic, much less political, reform.
The volume's second part, “International challenges to rising China,” flows naturally from the political-economy analysis in part one. In their chapter on “Xi Jinping and the challenges to Chinese security,” Robert Ross and Mingjiang Li summarize the problems facing Chinese foreign and national security policy: the difficulty in reconciling the contradiction between “peaceful rise” and defending Chinese interests; nationalism at home and abroad; reduced Communist Party legitimacy that can lead to external assertiveness; and, a fragmented policy-making system (p. 253), the latter consideration admirably explained in Linda Jakobson's chapter.
In this reviewer's reading, no chapter writer excludes the possibility of reinvigorated (economic) reform in the remainder of the Xi era (however long that may prove to be), but a sense of increasing doubt suffuses the volume.
Compounding the sobriety of this volume's analysis are developments in the world beyond the PRC. China's foreign policy is driven not only by its own internal dynamics, but also by stimuli from the outside world. Since this volume went to press, the outside world has changed considerably, with the rise of nationalist/populist/anti-globalist leaders around the world. Of all the significant external wild cards for China, none is more significant than the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington. The book title this development suggests is: China–US Relations in the Eras of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
