by David Shambaugh China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom by Richard Baum China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files by Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley New York Review Books, 280 pp. This article was first published in the September 30, 2010 issue of In the next few weeks, an event will take place in Beijing on a par with anything dreamed up by a conspiracy theorist. A group of roughly three hundred men and women will meet at an undisclosed time and location to set policies for a sixth of humanity. Most China watchers will eventually learn that the meeting is taking place and scramble to figure out what is going on, but all the outside world will receive is a terse acknowledgment that it took place and a few gnomic sentences on its outcome. In the weeks that follow, learned scholars will plumb this statement for its deeper meaning, subjecting it to textual analysis and proposing a series of hypotheses that may never be proven.