China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation

David Shambaugh sets out to answer whether or not the Chinese Communist Party can survive? While the simple answer is yes, he is cautious about predicting what this future party or state will look like. In his own estimation, the major challenge for the CCP is in becoming "more of a transformational than a transactional party...[it must realize] how to remain relevant to society as a ruling party but also how to inspire and lead the nation in new directions" (169). In order to do this, Shambaugh suggests that the CCP might strengthen the National People's Congress or even the role of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress to add a greater voice for other parties within the government. He dismisses current suggestions that China is at a tipping point or stagnating, but never provides sufficient reasoning as to why he disagrees. His ultimate assessment is that, political reforms, like economic reforms, will occur incrementally.The only thing David Shambaugh likes more than the word ossified, is ambivalence. Through the course of his work he is careful of rocking the boat when it comes to current conventions about China. He tells the reader that the answer to the party survival question: "is neither yes nor no but both" (177). This has the effect of causing the reader to feel cheated. When so many other China scholars like Minxin Pei or Roderick MacFarquhar are willing to make bold predictions, David Shambaugh is surprisingly quiet. Where he does make bold statements, they are often academic jabs, such as when he asserts that, "the China field in the United States seems to know more and more about less and less" (23). Shambaugh falls within the existing analysis of the CCP, rather than offering anything new. He agrees with Andrew Nathan, Alice Miller and Jing Huang, that the CCP is undergoing a "reinstitutionalization" (whatever that means) but takes eight chapters to get to that point. Still Shambaugh provides the reader with fascinating CCP memos and documents that require relatively little analysis. In the end his own cautiousness might serve him well. Predicting the future of a country of 1.3 billion is a near impossible task, and perhaps no author should be required to do so.

David Shambaugh has provider the reader an excellent book to grasp the ongoing transformational economic and political changes inside the People's Republic of China. I enjoyed reading it along with others as I prepare to visit Asia this summer for the first time.One of the more interesting parts of the book is the detailed descriptions provides as to how the Chinese "Think Tanks" viewed the changes in the Soviet Union and Europe in the late 1980's and 1990's. It is even more interesting to seek to understand how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to incorporate change into the party.The reaosn I wanted to read this book (and I do recommend it to those interested in contemporary Chinese politics) is to better understand the United States relationship with the Chinese government. While the balance of trade between the United States and China favors the latter; and, the debt instruments be issued by the US Treasury are being purchased rapidly by the Chinese interests, it is time every thinking American serioulsy ponder the American-Chinese relationship as never before.I am taken aback by the Chinese drive into science and technology in the 21st Century, I am concerned that America will soon find itself behind the Chinese in a human space program with the next footprints on the moon being Chinese. A recent MIT study recommended cooperation instead of competition between US and China space interests. This book provides a little more context to think about our national relationships.

From my perspective as a non-specialist, I thought there was perhaps more history than I had hoped for and not enough analysis of the future of the Party.

Whether you are a "China Watcher" or not, you will get a lot from this fairly concise book. Shambaugh is one of my favorite China scholars.

Dr. Shambaugh wrote a good and fairly objective book about China's communist party assessment of the situation with communism around the world, and the lessons to be learned from the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 80s.