On the day I received this book the lead foreign story in The Times was headed ‘Reformist Chinese President cracks down on liberals’. There is no sign that Xi Jinping, China’s president since March and the son of a veteran Party Central Committee member, is a ‘reformer’, or that he would do anything other than arrest those ‘liberals’ who boldly wore badges saying ‘citizen’, a person subject to the rule of constitutional law rather than ‘people’, cowering before the Party’s diktats. 

Orville Schell is a prominent populariser of Chinese affairs (whom I have known for many years), now at the Asia Society in New York; John Delury, a younger scholar, teaches at Yonsei University in Seoul. They apparently expected something different from the new regime. At the congress where Xi was