A book on ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’
WHILE I have a number of books on the rise of China (all by Western authors), I was not interested in Chinese, Western-educated Keyu Jin and her 2023 “The New China Playbook.” I had seen it browsing through amazon.com, but the book’s title suggested to me that it was another of those instant books written by American authors wanting to make a fast buck out of the current global interest in China.
I guess it’s another case of that old aphorism, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” After I watched George Will — a conservative opinion writer — in a YouTube video so enthusiastic about it, I immediately got a Kindle copy. Search YouTube, and she’s one of the most interviewed expert on China by experts these days.
I found it the best explanation of the rise of China, and especially the nature of the “socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics” economic and social system, as its leader Xi Jinping, calls it. China’s playbook, Jin explains, is not global domination, as US ideologues insist it is, but the strengthening of its new, unique kind of socialism — basically a state-guided capitalism, with the masses as its main winners, rather than big capitalists — within its borders.
I myself think the Chinese have already proved their system could be the best for humankind: roughly 40 years — a mere generation — from the early 1980s to 2020, China’s system had lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty. That’s practically a miracle: capitalism in its 250 years as the dominant system in the world has instead created 4 billion living below the poverty line. In our case, Filipino capitalism has created 18 million poor, about 16 percent of our 115 million population. And believe you me, not one of that millions poor really care about “Miranda rights” read to them nor the right to vote — with the latter not really an exercise in democracy for them, but an income-earner.
The bonus is that it’s very easy reading, due to Jin’s (her family name) mastery of English, having taken her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at Harvard University.
Jin’s “The New China Playbook” is not a “manual” for Beijing’s next moves but an attempt to redraw the mental map through which the world sees China — and through which China sees itself. It is a sophisticated book which explains that China is neither the new Soviet Union nor an unstoppable imperial juggernaut.
Jin, a Chinese economist teaching at the London School of Economics, positions herself not as propagandist or dissident but as interpreter of China’s internal logic. The core claim is simple: The dominant Western narrative — that China behaves like a Western great power, driven by expansionism, profit-maximizing capitalism and ideological revisionism — rests on a wrong starting point.
For Jin, the Communist Party is less a Stalinist relic than a sprawling organization trying to govern a huge 1.4 billion people amid the fastest sustained transformation in modern history. Its legitimacy is performance-based: Growth, poverty reduction and stability matter more than Marxist slogans, which are increasingly merely background music to a deeply pragmatic project of national development.
Stability
The keyword in Jin’s story is “stability.” She argues that Chinese leaders are haunted by the memory of repeated breakdowns — the disintegration of the Qing dynasty, the warlord era, civil war, famine and the Cultural Revolution — and that this trauma has made disorder the ultimate nightmare
In that light, China’s system appears not as authoritarianism for its own sake but as a mechanism to prevent a return to chaos. Western advice about democratization or rapid liberalization lands on deaf ears, she suggests, because it assumes instability is an acceptable cost of reform, whereas for Beijing instability is existential. This is Jin’s first major challenge to Western readers: Stop assuming China is a delayed version of Eastern Europe in 1989, waiting for the right spark to democratize.
Jin’s strongest chapters are economic. She explains why China did not embrace free market fundamentalism, but instead built a hybrid of state-guided capitalism, powerful state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and an activist industrial policy. The phrase she uses is “developmental pragmatism”: like Japan and South Korea before it, China used the state to push investment, build infrastructure and bet on strategic sectors — only on a far larger scale.
The system did have distortions: bloated SOEs, a property bubble, demographic decline and an unhealthy reliance on investment rather than household consumption. Yet Jin insists these weaknesses largely arise from earlier rational choices at a different stage of development. Jin reports that 20 years ago, state enterprises produced 70 percent of China’s economy; now it is the private sector which does that. The infrastructure frenzy, criticized abroad as a waste, is recast as the price of national integration and a dense manufacturing ecosystem; industrial policy is defended as a response to market failures in funding emerging industries.
Where the book becomes more interesting is in its treatment of China’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Jin shows how e commerce, fintech and platform giants like Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance emerged not from laissez faire but from state-enabled experimentation, loose early regulation and extremely demanding consumers who forced constant innovation.
She does not romanticize this story. The subsequent crackdown on tech giants — symbolized by the halted Ant Group IPO of billionaire Jack Ma — is portrayed as an attempt to prevent private capital from becoming “too-big-to-govern.”
Controversial
The most controversial part of Jin’s argument lies in her treatment of US-China tensions. She rejects the view that the clash is primarily ideological — a liberal democracy confronted with a Leninist autocracy — and instead emphasizes mutual misperception. From Beijing’s vantage point, she writes, the United States is trying to contain a rising power and replay a century of humiliation through encirclement and technology denial.
Jin argues that many Western assumptions are simply wrong: China does not seek global domination, nor does it aspire to export its political model. The real priorities remain inward: avoiding the middle income trap, sustaining growth and maintaining domestic stability in the face of slowing momentum and worsening demographics.
Jin is blunt about China’s demographic trap: a rapidly aging population, shrinking workforce and the long tail of the one child policy. She argues this will force a shift away from growth driven by sheer scale toward growth driven by productivity, innovation and human capital. Yet she is more optimistic than most about China’s capacity to adapt, citing high savings, a culture of intense investment in education and rapid technological upgrading as potential shock absorbers.
Jin repeatedly warns against treating either the “Western model” or the “Chinese model” as universally applicable. China is not a delayed West, and the West is hardly an unchanging beacon of liberal virtue, given its own crises of inequality, political paralysis and populism. The book’s most valuable contribution may be this insistence on humility: on the need to see systems as products of history and institutional path dependence rather than as morality plays.
Translator
But the stance of “translator” comes with risks. Jin’s access to official narratives and data allows a nuanced reconstruction of Beijing’s self-image, yet it also leads to understatements, for instance, of opaque incentives that drive policymaking at the top. The result is a book that is neither propaganda nor denunciation but occupies a precarious middle ground: too sympathetic for hardened China hawks, too candid for nationalists who want only validation.
Jin argues that Chinese behavior is also shaped by historical trauma, fear of vulnerability and the drive for regime survival, not only by opportunistic expansion. That is a useful corrective to lazy caricatures of a monolithic, omnipotent China marching inexorably outward.
For me, Jin’s book describes well a totally different system from the capitalism we’ve been brainwashed as the only possible system for humanity.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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A book on ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’
Source: Breaking News PH
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