Written in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising and crackdown, China’s Crisis examines the pressures that caused it, from the economic reform without political liberalisation, conflict within the Communist Party, the growth of unofficial social power, and task of governing a country transformed by the post-Mao era. 

The book moves between institutional analysis and political diagnosis, examining factional competition within the Chinese leadership, the limits of civil society, the democratic movement, and Taiwan’s contrasting political trajectory. Its account of factionalism is particularly useful: power operates not as a clean ideological struggle but through defensive alliances, private bargaining and rival networks whose primary aim is often survival. Reform therefore becomes a dangerous internal game in which every opening threatens someone else’s position.

Some of its expectations inevitably belong to the charged historical moment in which it was written, but that is also what makes the book valuable. It captures China at a point when market reform, authoritarian continuity and democratic possibility had not yet settled into the configuration now familiar to us. A sharp period document for readers interested in modern China, Tiananmen, authoritarian resilience and the political limits of economic liberalisation.

Columbia University Press, 1990 paperback, second printing. Light rubbing and edge wear; clean and sound.