China Law Blog writes to Tom with accolades and a note:

We really enjoy reading your blog. So on this post we decided to "outsource" the heavy thinking to well, heavy thinkers like yourself!

Tom responds:

Pei is an old friend from Harvard, and one of the smartest guys I know. This article seems a summary of his new book on corruption in China. I'll withold judgment on the book, which I'm sure is good, but this article left me flat. It told me a lot of things I knew or suspected about China, but instead of telling a story, it comes off as a non-stop litany of scary facts. I could gin up a litany like this for any state, and many do regularly for the U.S., but I don't know what to do with it except agree with the notion that most growing countries with such corruption afflictions typically need a good scare to reform themselves toward more pluralism and rule of law. Pei makes bold assertions about inevitable decay and cites the neo-Leninist character of the regime as the key culprit, but offers (at least not here) no larger sense of the "correlation of forces," to use a Marxist phrase, so it just comes off like a U.S.-style political book that argues the downside with the same sort of imbalance and lack of context that characterizes the bullish, positive reviews of China, and frankly that sort of imbalance is atypical of Pei, who may be trying too hard to push the content as counter-intuitive.

I would need this account of the intransigence of Party hacks to be balanced against the stunning rise of the entrepreneurial class and civil and commercial law in China. Pei paints a "Deadwood"-like picture of rapacious capitalism and official corruption, but he seems to judge it from a historical standard that doesn't take into account that much of current Chinese capitalism comes closest to late 19th century America, which was amazingly corrupt and rapacious. The big questions are missing here on trajectory, pace, fluidity, correlation of forces, etc., so I am left dizzy with stats but not much understanding or expectation.

To me, a great editor makes sure you don't go down that path of explaining too much while skimping on narrative and context, but since it's deeply unwise to judge books by summary articles, I'll pass on saying anything more than this article both impressed me with its marshalling of facts but left me unmoved by its lack of contextual analysis.

And that disappoints, because Pei typically dazzles, no matter what the venue.