Clear Thinkers favorite James Fallows, who is currently working in China for The Atlantic, posts a recommendation for China Road (Random House 2007), a new book about China by NPR’s long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford. Inasmuch as one of the best books that I read last year was Adrian Goldsworthy’s extraordinary biography of Julius Caesar, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale 2006), one passage from Gifford’s book that Fallows includes in his blog post intrigued me, particularly given the West’s difficulties over the centuries in maintaining normalized political relations with various Chinese governments:

Chairman Mao was just the most recent of a long line of re-unifiers, and if Emperor Qin were to return to China today, he would recognize the mode of government used by the Communist Party. I have to say that I find this idea rather scary, that two thousand years of history might have done nothing to change the political system of a country. Imagine a Europe today where the Roman Empire had never fallen, that still covered an area from England to North Africa and the Middle East and was run by one man based in Rome, backed by a large army. There you have, roughly, ancient and modern China. The fact that this setup has not changed, or been able to change, in two thousand years must also have huge implications for the question Can China ever change its political system.