BOOKS IN BRIEF The Coming Collapse of China by Gordon G. Chang (Random House, 320 pp., $26.95) When, in the early 1970s, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”, he was wrong about the date, but right about the collapse. Now Gordon Chang, an American lawyer who has worked in China for two decades, has written an acerbic analysis of China’s economic, social, and political problems–and predicted that within five years China will collapse into post-Communist fiefdoms, possibly as the result of economic upheaval, possibly as the result of war with Taiwan, which Chang thinks China will lose. Chang focuses on the economic problems facing Beijing–especially the impending bankruptcy of many of China’s state-owned enterprises. A 1999 report showed that 89 percent had distorted their profit-and-loss statements in the previous year. A Bank of China report indicates that 25 percent of Chinese bank loans are non-performing. Outside observers put that figure at closer to 70 percent. When China joins the World Trade Organization next year, Chang notes, large segments of China’s agricultural economy will succumb to international competition, creating massive unemployment: tens of millions of angry, perhaps desperate indigents. “China’s leaders,” Chang writes, “have not been able to recognize what the rest of the world already knows: socialism, with or without ‘Chinese characteristics,’ does not work.” The end will not be pretty. In “about five years,” the combination of economic collapse, outrage at the Communists’ corruption, and nationalistic anti-Han rage in Tibet and Xinjiang, will combine to bring about in China the process of collapse that characterized communism’s demise in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. “There will be blood, because the Chinese Communist party, born of struggle, will not yield with grace.” Chang’s reporting and writing is often pithy and funny. He offers an insider’s account of business negotiations, and he notes the rise of heterodox belief systems with the Falun Gong and China’s burgeoning Christian house-church population. Where he is not as persuasive is in spelling out how China’s collapse is likely to occur. What if China’s Communists transform themselves into an ultra-nationalist party, popular–at least initially–because of tough nationalist stances on Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan? Under a less pessimistic scenario, a rump group of Communist leaders might bring forth a Chinese Gorbachev. Stranger things have happened. The collapse of the empire in 1911 brought to power a Hawaiian-educated Chinese Christian called Sun Yat-sen. He wasn’t a good politician, but he is still admired by both Chinese Communists and anti-Communists–which suggests there is hope for a less apocalyptic end than Chang predicts. –David Aikman The Feminist Dilemma When Success Is Not Enough by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba (AEI, 228 pp., $25) Have you ever noticed how the debate over affirmative action usually turns on issues of race, rather than sex, even though women are the principal beneficiaries of preferential treatment? Democrats know that the case for “gender” preferences is extraordinarily weak. Republicans are afraid of losing the “women’s vote.” The result is that affirmative action for women is seldom openly debated. In “The Feminist Dilemma,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba explain why. Although most Americans support equal opportunity for women, few favor state-imposed androgyny. But socially engineered androgyny is exactly what comparable worth, subsidized childcare, and a host of other feminist sponsored initiatives are all about–sold as remedies to the “wage gap” and “glass ceiling.” Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba convincingly expose these spurious rationalizations and reveal the aims of American feminism, and the surprising, often quiet, means that feminists have employed to achieve them. Covering a range of issues–sexual harassment, family leave, women’s athletics, affirmative action–“The Feminist Dilemma” provides a comprehensive critique of the practical program of feminism. –Stanley Kurtz
