REVOLUTION IS impossible until it is inevitable, reads the quotation from Leon Trotsky that serves as the inscription to this book.
For decades, the Soviet Union was an impregnable fortress whose demise was unimaginable, until it suddenly imploded a decade ago. Could China follow the same script?
The country, which holds a perennial fascination for many Western economic commentators, is once again in vogue.
Encouraged by its robust economic performance amid a global slowdown and with World Trade Organisation (WTO) entry just around the corner, forecasters are again touting the world's most populous nation as an economic superpower-in-waiting.
The optimists look at the mainland and see a country of unlimited potential, run by progressive technocrats and busy embracing the future on all fronts: a country whose people have accepted the trade-off of material advancement in exchange for limited political freedom.
The pessimists (or realists, perhaps) see the brittle inheritors of a bankrupt ideology clinging to power behind the paper curtain of a brutal autocracy. They see a doomed class of rulers whose time is running out as the tide of economic transformation and history threatens to sweep them away.
