Yasheng Huang
Review via The Wall Street Journal
In the past few years, Yasheng Huang has found himself becoming disenchanted as a scholar, tired of the shackles placed on him by academic journals. Their excessive specialization has led, he complains, to a “suboptimal supply of big ideas.” So he set out to liberate himself from refereed publications and write a sweeping and “self-consciously ambitious” book about his native China. The riveting result is “The Rise and Fall of the EAST,” whose last word isn’t a reference to the Orient but is, instead, an acronym—for Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology—the interplay of which has shaped China for nearly 1,500 years.
