Jae Ho Chung, ed. Charting China s Future

摘要

"Prediction is very difficult," wrote physicist Niels Bohr, "especially about the future." In this edited volume, eight respected China scholars confirm Bohr's insight yet again. Under editor Jae Ho Chung's guidance, each author considers a different aspect of China's future. Five deal with domestic developmental issues (Jae Ho Chung, Bruce Dickson, Yawei Liu, Tao-chiu Lam, and Gilbert Rozman), while three deal with China's foreign relations (Shiping Tang, Peter Gries, and Jean-Pierre Cabestan). Each contributor was asked to examine the variable processes (or "drivers") that would most likely affect future developments in his particular issue area and then to formulate a set of future scenarios reflecting a range of different values for these drivers, with the scenarios ordinally ranked in terms of probability. This is a very tall order. And the results are (with apologies to Bohr) predictably mixed.