Where is China headed? To American-scale prosperity, military domination of Asia, and an epoch of cultural renaissance? Or to hell in a handbasket? You can find learned, thoughtful and well-informed commentators committed to both points of view, and many in between. The strongest tendency of the last few years, however, has been towards deepening pessimism, and Gordon Chang's The Coming Collapse of China, as its title indicates, is squarely within this tendency. The author lightens his prognosis with some occasional expressions of hope, but these do not seem to me to carry much conviction, and the overall impression of his book is one of inspissated gloom.

Gordon Chang is not an academic, but a practical man who has lived and worked in China for twenty years as an advisor to American firms. He was raised in a Chinese household; his father was born in China; he knows the country very well. Probably because of his own work experience, he concentrates on the commercial and economic environment in China. You might have got the impression from some of the more upbeat commentary in our news media that the Communist Party has faded into the background, stepping aside to give China's entrepreneurial forces free rein. Nothing of the sort, says Mr. Chang: the Party's urge to control everything in sight is irresistible. It is irresistible to the cadres themselves, not least because it offers them endless opportunities to enrich themselves by corruption. And there is no organized alternative power center in Chinese society that can resist it, because the Party never has, and never will, permit any such alternative to develop. . . .

Underlying all these economic issues are deeper matters that Gordon Chang can only hint at in the prevailing structure of taboos — issues of national character and mass psychology. There is that maddening obsession with the surface of things, with the belief that if everything looks all right, then everything must be all right. "Laying straw over a minefield," is how one of Mr. Chang's informants describes a typical exercise in cosmetic enhancement, of the kind familiar to anyone who has lived in China. There is, too, the endless picking at old wounds, the tender cherishing of ancient grievances. "Yes," he points out, "the British burned the Summer Palace and the Chinese have a right to be angry. Yet the British also burned the American capital, but when was the last time you heard anyone complain about the War of 1812?" . . .

Melancholy prognostications like Gordon Chang's would be a little easier to bear if one did not know that observers have been making them for at least a hundred years. . . . Weariness of the spirit is an occupational hazard for those of who watch China. Gordon Chang closes his book with the thought that: "All the struggle and turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are just a prelude to what will come in the twenty-first." This is probably true. Poor, poor China.