How Will the Xi Jinping era End?

In this essay for The New York Review of Books, I explore the sensitive issue of who will succeed Xi Jinping. As a jumping-off point, I review two new books on succession in China and the Soviet Union. The upshot is we could be in for a long wait for a successor, with decay setting in. The books are fascinating–you’ll see in the essay that I highly recommend them–and they are rich in detail and ideas. So the essay was really a pleasure to write, and for that I’m grateful to the authors (Victor Shih of UC San Diego and Joseph Torigian of American University.)

The essay is paywalled but if you register at the site you can get a free article. If you’re really insistent on getting it for free, it will eventually be made free a month from now courtesy of the Asia Society ChinaFile website here.

There you can find all of my previous NYRB articles unpaywalled and many many other great China-related articles that ran in the NYRB, by far better-known authors, such as Simon Leys, Orville Schell, Xu Zhangrun, Geremie Barmé, Fang Lizhi, Jonathan Spence, Rod MacFarquhar and many others.