What happens when a communist autocracy presides over a dynamic market economy? Do they live together happily ever after or does one destroy the other?

A visit to Beijing last week, combined with reading the thought-provoking new book by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American scholar of Chinese origins, has persuaded me to raise these questions.* But they have been bubbling in my mind since I read S.E. Finer’s illuminating discussion of the history of China’s government.** What emerges from this masterpiece is how much today’s party-state is just another imperial dynasty in twentieth century guise.