WPR's The New Rules: "China's 'Great Leap Backward' No Cause for Alarm"

The Western press is rife with stories about China's growing conservatism, reflected by an ongoing crackdown on free speech by Chinese authorities as well as a Maoist revival in the interior provinces. In our alarm, we imagine the worst of all possible outcomes: an all-powerful Chinese economy lorded over by a political system that somehow reverts to its communist-era politics of open antagonism with the West. While there are powerful structural dynamics that work against this combination, we should nonetheless not fear it. To the extent that China's economic trajectory is threatening to stall out, as it inevitably must at some point, the instinctive retreat of its political system into "redness" has little to do with the outside world. Rather it reflects the yawning chasm between a party of privileged "princelings" and the increasingly stressed-out masses. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.