This intriguing work by Daniel Lynch begins with the premise that it is important to identify the “attractors” – or deep-seated tendencies towards which any complex human system moves or the limits within which it operates – that will guide China's future. A second premise is that representations of the future by political elites have a self-fulfilling dynamic as those same elites try to bring about or try to prepare for those futures. Taken together, these premises imply that a careful reading of elite Chinese representations of their country's future are one important attractor that will shape China's future and are therefore of great value in prediction. The task Lynch sets himself then is to canvas as much writing published in open source and “internal circulation only” journals in China (in this case between 2006 and 2013) on the future in order to identify these attractors.

The five substantive chapters describe elite thinking about the future of China's economy, political system, society, foreign policy and soft power. The prescriptions are for continued economic liberalization, minimal political reform, stepped up social controls, an aggressive foreign policy, and investment in soft power. In a concluding chapter, Lynch argues that “commitment to the national rise” (p. 254) is the unifying elite vision of China's future across these issue areas. This will not surprise many readers, he notes, who will be “well aware that such thinking has deep roots in modern Chinese history” (p. 255).

One can take issue with this approach – the dominant strands of thinking among Soviet elites in the 1980s were useless in predicting that country's future. Still, taken at face value, the book is a useful compendium of elite thinking on China's future, even if it does not introduce any new concepts or strains of thought hitherto overlooked by China-watchers. However, its ambitions are to hold predictive value and here the methodological infrastructure proves insufficient. A key question for such research is how to select data. This is a long-standing and unresolved problem of the field of history, which is here replicated in this study of “future histories.” Invariably, there are multiple competing representations of the future. Indeed, Lynch finds that “dominant strands of thinking” are evident in only two of the five issue areas (the economy and foreign policy).

As a result, there is really no way – or no method proposed – by which to discern which representations are the more likely “attractors” of China's future. Lynch mentions in the preface that he made those choices “whenever I came to a point in my reading where I felt that all or most of the voices were trending [sic] in one direction” (xiii). However, he consciously selected only representations that were not repeats of Party policy nor some version of “there are challenges but all will end well.” He calls such writings “noise.” He read only those “that appeared genuinely to contribute to debates” (xiii), or what he calls “signals.” Even then, the signals are confusing in three of the five issue areas and the apparent consensus in the other two may be an artifact of his unspecified selection mechanism relating to “genuine contributions.”

Heaped on top of this difficulty is how to aggregate the future representations in these five areas in ways that reflect some view about how the various policy spaces interact with each other. Again, there is nothing offered about how to do this. Indeed, as Lynch discovers, the dominant representations in these five issue-areas are often mutually incompatible, or “unhinged.” The soft power advocates are unaware of network society. The foreign policy rise advocates are unaware of economic challenges. The political caution advocates are unaware of both. These elites are “effectively out of touch with the fundamental Chinese realities on which the success or failure of the rise must unavoidably rest, no matter how strong the analysts beliefs” (p. 248). In other words, elite representations are in danger of being mugged by socio-economic reality, as they were in the Soviet Union, and thus of not much use to prediction, even if some common view existed, which it often does not.

Lynch's book will be an invaluable record of what China's top thinkers were saying to each other in the early 21st century. Either these visions will be attractors that guide China's future or reminders of how badly out of touch elites can become in Leninist systems.