New Book: The Third Revolution

Xi Jinping and the New
Chinese State

by Elizabeth C. Economy

“To understand and navigate China in the coming years, this is the book to read.”  ~ Fred P. Hochberg, Chairman & President, Export-Import Bank of the United States (2009-17)

Is Xi
Jinping a liberal reformer masquerading as a conservative nationalist until he
can more fully consolidate power?  Or are
his more liberal reform utterances merely a smokescreen for a radical reversal
of China’s policy of reform and opening up? 
How different is a Xi-led China from those that preceded it? 

One of
the great paradoxes of China today is Xi Jinping’s effort to position himself
as a champion of globalization, while at the same time restricting the free
flow of capital, information, and goods between China and the rest of the
world.  In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar, Elizabeth Economy,
provides an incisive look at the transformative
changes underway in the country today.

Published: 28 June 2018
360 Pages
235x156mm
ISBN: 9780190866075

Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and to create a system of international norms that better serves its more ambitious geostrategic objectives. In so doing, the Chinese leadership is reversing the trends toward greater political and economic opening, as well as the low-profile foreign policy, that had been put in motion by Deng Xiaoping's "Second Revolution" thirty years earlier. 

Through a wide-ranging exploration of Xi Jinping's top
political, economic and foreign policy priorities-fighting corruption, managing
the Internet, reforming the state-owned enterprise sector, improving the
country's innovation capacity, enhancing air quality, and elevating China's
presence on the global stage-Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and
successes of Xi's reform efforts over the course of his first five years in
office. She also assesses their implications for the rest of the world, and
provides recommendations for how the United States and others should navigate
their relationship with this vast nation in the coming years.

Elizabeth C. Economy is the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations. An expert on Chinese domestic and foreign
policy, her most recent book, with Michael Levi, is By All Means Necessary: How China’s Resource Quest is Changing the World.