Pei adds to his distinguished body of writing about China with an investigation of why the country shifted away from decades of reform and neo--authoritarianism (capitalist development under one-party rule) toward a new form of totalitarianism, and how engagement with the United States devolved into a new Cold War. He describes how, from the early 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Chinese Communist Party increasingly found itself stuck in what he terms a “partial reform