Randall Peerenboom's new book is part of a rapidly developing literature assessing the nature of China's rise and its significance for the rest of the world. It offers a thoughtful, challenging study of China's current state of economic development, human rights, rule of law and democratization, against a broader comparative background of developments in the East Asian region and, to a lesser extent, beyond. Building on his earlier work on human rights and the rule of law in China, Peerenboom seeks to mediate between two contrasting interpretations of China's rise, one of which sees its new status and power as a threat to the West, and the other which adopts a benign view of its burgeoning economic power and developing legal system, and, from the perspective of developing states, even promotes China as a model for development. Given his predilection for conceptual antinomies, which may itself be questioned, his style is polemical, interspersed with judicious judgements and much good, common sense. In many ways he speaks from the inside of China, as someone living and working there and profoundly aware of the complexities and ambiguities of its development. However, the audience he addresses is unmistakeably the United States, where concern about, and fears of, China have deep historical roots. He therefore assumes the roles of interpreter, judge, and, on occasions, advocate, testing the simple antinomies of prejudice against a more complex reality and introducing the reader to a more refined, disaggregated and tempered view of China's modernization and its significance for the world.

The value of placing China's development in its regional context is that China's developmental preferences may be understood not as isolated and idiosyncratic, but as part of a broad regional paradigm. Peerenboom's comparison between two principal models of economic development, the Washington Consensus (WC) and the Beijing Consensus (BC), a version of the East Asian Model (EAM), also puts China's particular choices into perspective. He contrasts China's judicious mixing and matching of the best features of the two main models with the mix adopted by other states in the region, whether with respect to economic development or to human rights and democracy. The result is a surprising eclecticism of policies which confounds simplistic antinomies, even though most Asian states are alike in theoretically privileging economic development and economic and social rights over civil and political rights.

A similar comparative optic is applied to the legal, human rights and institutional underpinnings of China's modernization. One of the most valuable, and controversial, chapters in the book is that on institutional reform, in which Peerenboom focuses on China's efforts to build a rule of law, from both above and below. His implication that states can have a ‘thin’ rule of law without a separation of powers, that is, without tackling the intimate relationship between Party, state, and legal institutions, will be queried by many. So too will his discussion of the way China can develop a rule of law without seriously addressing the principle of equality before the law. Indeed, Peerenboom admits as much when he acknowledges that ‘many will question whether a socialist rule of law is really a rule of law’ (p. 196).

In fact, at no point does Peerenboom shy away from controversy: he positively invites a lively interaction between writer and reader. While many of his judgements are matters of common sense, others are more subjective. For instance, one can agree with the his finding that, in the light of US treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, US criticism of China's human rights is open to the charge of double standards, and even of using human rights as a ‘grand strategy of containment’. One can also agree that the European Union, and, I would add, Australia, are open to a similar charge of adopting double standards. On the other hand, it does not follow, as he appears to suggest, that states and, more particularly, international bodies, should therefore not evaluate (other) countries’ human rights (p. 178).

One may also question some of the underlying assumptions behind his judgements. For instance, his insistence that China's model of development shows that ‘political stability is essential’, appears to blur the distinction between his role as interpreter and that of advocate. It also appears to condemn China to authoritarian rule in perpetuity. In addition, while Peerenboom is not a classical economic determinist, his work is based on an assumption that human rights and rule of law only flourish in the context of a developed economic base. A modified version of the ‘trickle down’ assumption thus leads to his reading of economic and social rights in China as being more successful than its civil and political rights, a claim recent World Bank reports appear to undermine. It encourages an assessment of the glass as half full rather than half empty. Likewise, he argues that ‘democratization at lower levels of wealth is likely to be counterproductive’ (p. 290). And yet, four pages later he concedes that ‘many developing countries lack the [economic] resources to deliver. They are thus unable to delay political reforms by buying off the populace with higher material standards of living’ (p. 294) In other words, as a by-product of its success in buying off its populace with higher material standards of living, China may effectively have delayed, rather than promoted, democratization, an argument which contradicts even a ‘watered-down’ version of the theory of the trickle-down effect.

Nevertheless, whatever one's subjective reactions to specific judgements in this book, Peerenboom should be applauded for his part in stimulating a rethinking of some of the fundamental issues underlying China's inevitable rise and for restoring some sense of balance and perspective about it. His book is an important and timely corrective to hysterical overreactions to a shift in the global power balance which, if wiser heads prevail, could occur peacefully, but which, if they do not, have the potential to lead to renewed international tensions with strong Cold War overtones and disastrous consequences.