Book Review: The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism by Minxin Pei, 2025 (344 pages)
How, in the 21st century, did totalitarianism return to the People’s Republic of China? This is the question at the heart of Minxin Pei’s new book, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism.
Pei is an acclaimed scholar of Chinese politics. He is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and a George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is the editor of the China Leadership Monitor, a quarterly journal on China’s foreign and domestic politics and the author of three earlier books on China’s leadership and domestic politics: China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006), China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016), and The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024).
Pei describes The Broken China Dream as a summary of his earlier three books as well as an account of his own intellectual journey from optimism over China’s future to his current pessimism. That pessimism springs from what Pei sees as the missed opportunities after the death of Mao Zedong, as well as the persistent pathologies that afflict the Chinese Communist Party.
Pei argues that the 1980s was the “decisive decade,” when the country had options to transition away from its totalitarian roots and towards a form of political liberalization.1 China missed that opportunity when Deng Xiaoping, who Pei labels a “pragmatic Leninist,” teamed up with “hardcore conservatives” like Chen Yun to crush “liberal reformers” like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, as well as the student protesters in Tiananmen Square.2 He argues that while Deng and his conservative colleagues did not want to see the return of a Mao-like figure and sought to turn the country away from the worst accesses of totalitarianism, Deng ultimately failed as his guardrails were insufficient to prevent Xi Jinping from resurrecting totalitarianism and initiating a new cold war with the United States.
Deng’s failure to pursue political reforms, alongside his economic reforms, set the conditions for the nearly inevitable return of a Party-state under Xi Jinping with total control over Chinese institutions, Chinese society, and the Chinese people.
A critical reader might question Pei’s interpretation of Deng’s intentions during this “decisive decade” and into the 1990s. Was Deng Xiaoping truly committed to preventing the return of a Mao-like figure? Pei does not provide persuasive evidence that Chinese Communist Party leaders, from the revolutionary era, had any intention of preventing the return of totalitarianism. The economic reforms they pursued, as well as the pragmatic neo-authoritarianism they practiced, seems like a strategy for building wealth, strength, and power, which a future Chinese Communist Party leader could wield on the domestic and global stage. Given the backgrounds of these leaders, it appears clear that they believed that their vanguard party, in the Leninist sense, required totalitarian capabilities, even if they resisted using those capabilities during a period of weakness.
Pei spends significant time describing the guardrails that Deng and his colleagues constructed to enable collective leadership and a degree of checks and balances among competing Party factions. Nevertheless, these guardrails were too weak to hold back a determined Xi Jinping when he came to power in 2012. Pei presents this failure to make these guardrails stronger and permanent as a mistake by Deng.
But another interpretation is that these guardrails were intentionally designed to be dissolvable stitches or surgical sutures that hold an injured body together while it heals but disappear once recovery is complete. In this case, the body that required healing was the Chinese Communist Party after Mao’s disastrous rule. The constraints and guardrails that Deng and his colleagues designed were only meant to remain in place until the Party had time to heal and for China to grow wealthy and strong.
Under this interpretation, the weakness of the guardrails of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s was a feature, not a bug. Deng and his colleagues believed in the necessity of a Leninist Party-state and intended to provide a future Chinese Communist Party leader with all the institutional capabilities that Mao had access to, plus the wealth and power that would come after a successful modernization drive.
This helps explain why Deng buried Zhao Ziyang’s 1987 political reform framework, which appears to have been a roadmap for dismantling the Leninist totalitarian institutions in China.
While one might quibble about what Deng Xiaoping intended, Minxin Pei’s The Broken China Dream is an excellent handbook for understanding modern China, the country’s elite politics, and the future trajectory of one of the world’s most important global powers. He closes the book with a brief analysis of how the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping precipitated a “new cold war.”3 While this geopolitical condition wasn’t inevitable, the Party’s totalitarianism created path dependencies that made the new cold war difficult to avoid. Pei also observes that Xi’s revival of totalitarianism, which the Chinese leader views as necessary for achieving the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” has counterintuitively resulted in putting “his ‘China dream’ into serious long-term jeopardy.”4 It is hard to argue with either of those conclusions.
