Susan L. Shirk’s Overreach remarkably charts the changes of Chinese leadership at home and their actions abroad since the demise of Mao Tsedong.

The regime of Xi Jinping is much more authoritarian and insecure than we generally understand, leading us to both underestimate the Chinese Communist Party’s ambition and overestimate its capabilities for world domination.

While the diminutive Deng Xiaoping began a process of decentralizing China’s government to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a charismatic leader in the future, the men who followed him turned the bureaucracy into a self-serving mosh pit of corruption and inertia.

Xi attempts to turn the ship of state around with crackdowns on corruption, more stringent social controls, and aggression on foreign objectives. He announced a new “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Shirk’s thesis is that Xi is achieving the opposite of his goals making his regime less secure in the process.

At the risk of making Xi the bogeyman, one has to ask, in all fairness and with a straight face, what really is “socialism with Chinese characteristics?”

a) A country where most people would rather speculate on real estate than attend Party meetings?

b) A country so corrupt that the new bridge built for a state of the art high-speed train collapses within a couple years because its builders opted to use low-grade concrete and pay out enormous bribes to get the contract?

c) A country that gives brownie points to citizens who don’t jay walk using social media and high-powered facial recognition technology?

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” harkens back to Alexander Dubcek’s famous speech associated with the doomed Prague Spring of1968. As Czechoslovakian exports began losing competitiveness on world markets Dubcek became First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party promising economic and cultural reforms.

He called his new program “socialism with a human face,” in fact too human for his conservative opponents. Dubcek’s reforms were snubbed out when Warsaw Pact countries answered with columns of Russian tanks. The following year he was dumped from the leadership of the Party.

Nuclear scientist and Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov later credited Dubcek with the birth of dissent in the Soviet Soviet Union and made possible Gorbachev’s perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet union.

Xi’s announced reforms had nothing to do with liberalization. Rather, he has hardened the Chinese Communist Party’s response to dissent in Beijing, in Hong Kong, and throughout the CCP’s sphere of influence.

Slogans aside, there is no justification on God’s Green Earth for a single party state. None.

It’s not as though people are clamoring to immigrate to the great workers’ paradise.

Not even given what we know about the Republican Party, amazon.com, and the Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world. (Winston Churchill once said that: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”)

Yet President for life Xi Jinping operates as if there were.

And it is one of the great ironies of history that instead of building a workers’ paradise, China’s social architects have built a Walmart paradise.

While Shirk doesn’t go quite this far, it is both ironic and fitting that Xi’s prdecessors, incl. Hu Jintao and Jang Zemin, ultimately built governments of such self-dealing and logrolling it would have made the bureaucracies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush blush with shame.

Shirk’s prescription for US Presidents handling the Chinese Leviathan in international affairs is to fix democracy at home and slowly feed incentives to the Chinese leadership to want to cooperate with its neighbours so that they will bully them less.

But in the real world the US and its ally the United Kingdom are arming Australia with nuclear subs to police the South China Sea.

Also in the real world Xi brokers a deal re-opening diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran which if it lasts demonstrates that One Party States can prove helpful to international relations. Granted it was one dictatorship talking to two other dictatorships. ( )