Review by Choice Review
Wong (Lingam Univ., Hong Kong) argues that the relative progress of economic marketization, social liberalization, and democratization in post-Maoist China can be usefully analyzed by employing the theory of "crises and sequences" in the process of political modernization that was first developed by Western social scientists in the 1960s-70s. He amplifies this approach by adding his take on the model of alternating cycles of "letting go" (fang) and "tightening up" (shou) that many scholars believe have characterized the policies of China's leaders in recent decades as they tried to manage the delicate balance between promoting needed reforms and maintaining communist party control. Wong concludes that Deng Xiaoping and his successor, Jiang Zemin, were largely successful in this regard and that socioeconomic change, accompanied by substantive administrative reform, has far outpaced democratization. He devotes a chapter to exploring the prospects for the further development of democracy in China. The book is an impressive compilation of facts and represents an interesting attempt to apply social science theory to make sense of Chinese politics. But it also reads like the barely revised doctoral dissertation (the conclusion even makes reference to "this thesis"!) and hastily published (full of grammatical and typographical mistakes) book that it is. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W. A. Joseph Wellesley College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
