China's New Rulers: The Secret Files (review)

China long has conjured up a sense of mystery and intrigue among Western observers. Just thirty-five years ago during the Cultural Revolution, Western intelligence analysts were starved for knowledge about the insular country and reportedly relied on Hong Kong's market stalls as a vital information source. They eagerly scoured through trash piles to retrieve the newspapers wrapped around vegetables grown nearby in China's Guangdong Province, hoping to find precious bits of information about that country's basic living conditions, government policies, and political leadership. Of course, China has been fundamentally transformed since that time. Communism as an economic system now exists in name only, replaced by a rapidly expanding market-based system. Information about China and its people is now plentiful, perhaps to the extent of analytical paralysis.