China's Age of Counterreform

ABSTRACT: China is steadily sliding deeper into the counterreform era. Economically, it is slowing down. Ideologically, it is closing up. Politically, it is steadily pivoting back toward personalistic one-man rule. As these trends deepen, Beijing's leaders are erasing core elements of both the reform and revolutionary eras, reviving ruinous Maoist governance practices of the 1950s, and turning back to China's imperial history in an effort to build a new ideological foundation for their authoritarian rule. Far from paving the way for China's twenty-first-century rise, Beijing's counterreforms are exacerbating its structural problems, weakening the nation and undermining its stability.