This is a well-researched and thoughtfully-presented work which seeks to combine an analysis of elite politics with developments in intellectual trends in the decade following the Tiananmen massacre in China. In so doing, Joseph Fewsmith examines several important strands of development in how this communist state, which was in crisis in 1989, avoided the fate of its East-European and Soviet fraternal states and turned itself into a developmental state that is also emerging as an economic powerhouse a decade later.