THE COMING COLLAPSE OF CHINA.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Review

THE COMING COLLAPSE OF CHINA by Gordon G. Chang Random House, $25.95

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS seeking an enemy abroad, and China has obliged. The bluff and bluster of Beijing during the recent spy plane flap gave American conservatives running room to advocate a return to Cold War-era policies. But no sooner had Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon announced that the United States was cutting off military ties with China than the Bush White House backed off the order and, in the meantime, continues to lobby Congress in support of increased trade with China. In the collision between commerce and confrontation, the businessman continues to win out in the GOP.

Who has it right? Is China, as the hawks would have it, a new Wilhelmine Germany, clamoring for its place in the sun? Or is it, as the business lobby promises, a formerly totalitarian country seduced into democratic ways by the lure of the market?

In The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon G. Chang says that both sides have it wrong. China, he declares, is headed for the scrapheap of history. It's certainly a case worth considering. One empire after another collapsed in the past century. Why should China, an old-fashioned empire made up of hundreds of different ethnic groupings, be any different?

Chang, a lawyer who worked for two decades in China, has written an impassioned book that rests on penetrating diagnoses and old-fashioned gumshoe reporting, conducting interviews with everyone from the high-and-mighty to the common peasant. His aim is to present an unvarnished portrait of China, free of the romanticism of the business lobby and the alarmism of the new cold warriors.

Chang focuses on the Communist Party, arguing that its failure to adapt to new economic and political challenges has made it as vulnerable to upheaval as previous Chinese imperial dynasties. He ascribes much importance to the emergence of the Falun Gong and contrasts it with the moral emptiness of the Communists. The best that Fu Qing-yuan, director of the Research Institute of Marxism-Leninism, can tell him is that "Many people in China are facing a crisis of faith. But I still believe that the majority of the Chinese people believe in dialectical materialism"

Chang notes that China is a hotbed of religious growth. One sign of religious fervor has come in the mushrooming of so-called "house churches." These Christian evangelical churches are independent of the government and meet secretly. They have been the target of much...