The latest from foreign affairs pundit Mark Leonard offers a snapshot of China’s intelligentsia and their influence on Chinese politics and society today. Leonard points out that whilst many people have some sense of the American political landscape, its key figures and debates (what with the neocons, conservative Christians, Clintonites and so on), few people in the West have a similar feel for China. Given the growing global weight of the country, his book is meant to help plug this gap in our knowledge.

What does China think? shows that despite the heavy hand of the autocratic one-party state, there is a surprisingly febrile level of debate within China, at least among the elite. The basic schism comes between what Leonard calls the New Right and the New Left: the waning New Right supports the free market and new capitalist class, whilst the waxing New Left wants to manage the vast new inequalities and environmental degradation resulting from market reform. Leonard flags up some important historical points, noting the long shadow cast over Chinese development by the USSR and the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s; and the alliance forged between China’s capitalists and party bosses following the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. One interesting possibility now is what Leonard calls ‘deliberative dictatorship’, where the Chinese Communist Party will stave off democracy by manipulating the public through opinion polling, low-level devolution of power and consultative procedures.

But all these ideas are ultimately difficult to judge, since the book is so subjective. How should we assess the depth and extent of any particular ideological trend or school of thought, without a more substantial analysis of social trends and historical development? How are we to assess the trajectory of any set of ideas when they are presented without any social context of class conflict and political struggles? Like others before him, Leonard is keen to use the rise of China to puncture Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, which declared the end of any substantial political struggles over the future following Western victory in the Cold War.

Leonard argues the West confronts a new challenge from resurgent China, that its success in wedding capitalism with one-party autocracy shows the spread of liberal democracy is not guaranteed. This is an odd point to make as China becomes more capitalist, which seems more a vindication of Fukayama’s thesis. What really emerges from the discussion is how familiar rather than ideologically different China is. The concerns of China’s ‘New Left’ – the environment, inequality, welfarism – are very similar to those of the Western left. According to Leonard, China’s generals and foreign affairs specialists are just as worried about ‘non-traditional’ security threats, multilateralism and building up their ‘soft power’ as are the European Union bureaucrats and planners in Brussels. The ‘deliberative dictatorship’  Leonard sees in consultation workshops and petty administrative tinkering could be applied as easily to Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s plans for ‘empowering’ local communities.

As China pumps its muscles and begins to push its own agenda, Leonard is right to say we’ll probably see a more competitive realpolitik emerging than did throughout the 1990s. But there is no ideological challenge to global capitalism, let alone threat to today’s world, represented in the clutch of brutish strong-men and Stalinoid dictators that make up the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Nor are there any signs that imperialist rivalries will return to tear apart the international order. On the contrary: instead of representing a deep international fracture, the modernisation of China means the interests and concerns of the Chinese people will grow closer to those of people in the West. To that extent, the rise of China signifies not the beginning of a newly divided world, but a more united and homogenous one.