Carl Minzner, The End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise

Excerpt

End of An Era, published in 2018, with a new paperback version in 2020, is a prescient analysis of China in the Xi Jinping Era. Though Minzner is a well-known scholar of Chinese law, the book is not an overly academic tome, nor it is focused on the legal system. The book implicitly draws from the critiques of modernization theory that arose in political science at the end of the 1960s when revolution, economic instability and stagnation, corruption and underdevelopment were ravaging the post-colonial developing world. Samuel Huntington in his seminal work, Political Order in Changing Societies, wrote that the key to political stability and successful governance was not economic development, but political institutions that can best manage the social and political consequences of rapid, destabilizing growth. In tracing the political and economic reforms of the post-Mao period, Minzner argues that the Chinese Communist Party has failed in its attempts to rejuvenate the political system so that it can manage rising social expectations, economic inequality, and emerging conflicts of ethnicity and identity. Political institutions have decayed (his word is “frozen”) and repression has replaced the flexibility and adaptiveness of the previous periods. …