As China grapples with enormous challenges — including an imploding property sector, unfavorable demographics and slowing growth — doubts about the future of the world’s largest growth engine are intensifying.
Add to that China’s geopolitical rise, together with deepening tensions with the United States, and the need to understand China’s political economy is becoming more urgent than ever.
A recent book by MIT’s Yasheng Huang — "The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline" — can help. Huang unpacks the “EAST” heuristic from the historical record of the last two and a half millennia, especially the last 40 years, to arrive at a clear conclusion: China must make radical changes if it is going to realize its full development potential.