China’s Past Told a Little Too Slickly

The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline

By Huang Yasheng

Yale University Press, 2023, 440 pages, $35 (Hardcover)

Huang Yasheng is a political economist at MIT and author of well-regarded studies on China’s economic reform era. In The Rise and Fall of the EAST, Huang swings for the fences. His book is an attempt to “go big,” offering a simple formula to explain 2,000 years of Chinese history, from the First Emperor of the Qin right through to Xi Jinping.

Of the four ingredients in the longevity of the Chinese political model, Huang starts with exams (keju in Mandarin) — the famed civil service examinations that were the main route to wealth, power and prestige from the late 500s until their abolition in 1905. Huang’s other factors — autocracy, stability and technology — are less specific to

China, and the author ends up overstating the case or drawing simplistic contrasts between East and West in order to make the case. For all its historical references (and “data”), Rise and Fall is not really interested in the past. The point is to make sense of the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule and its autocratic turn under Xi Jinping. But the arguments about the imperial past and analysis of the CCP present never quite come together; instead, they are like ships passing in the night. Meanwhile, most of the century of revolution by Chinese intellectuals from the 1890s to 1989 is written out of the story, because it does not fit the seamless from Confucian autocracy to Communist dictatorship.

A thought-provoking read, Rise and Fall of the EAST leaves its big ambitions unfulfilled.