"David Shambaugh and his contributors offer an invaluable guide to today's China and its immediate prospects - comprehensive, clearly written, based on deep experience and sober analysis rather than trendy theorising. Anyone with an academic or professional involvement with China will benefit from reading it." Sir Christopher Hum, British Ambassador to China 2002-2005 and Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge"David Shambaugh, as one of the West's leading political scientists studying China, and former editor of the China Quarterly, has been uniquely positioned to call upon leading China specialists around the globe to bring toghether some of the best Western scholarship on China. The authors avoid the temptation to resort to the usual facile generations and present a nuanced well-informed collection of chapters on China's politics, its economics, and society as well as relations with other countries." Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University, USA."Let us give credit to a publication of brilliant scholars who offer their clear opinions about what the future of China in the next couple of years might be like." - Richard Turcsanyi, Global Politics, January 2013.'This volume is a clearly written, well-informed, and forward-looking book that helps understand the complexities and challenges of China’s development. Two years after the publication of this reasoned work, the sober prognoses made by Shambaugh and his contributors have generally proved quite tenable and convincing.' - Ding Hui, China Perspectives 2013.