In the past decade, the world has become familiar with the image of Communist powers struggling in economic and political crisis. The crisis in China, whose economy is now the world's second largest and fastest growing, is perhaps the most serious of all, and Maurice Meisner's important new book shows how it stems from a deep spiritual and political dispute between capitalist realities and lingering socialist values and ideas.

The Deng Xiaoping Era is Meisner's analysis of that crisis and of how Deng Xiaoping's promise of socialist democracy degenerated into bureaucratic capitalism. He shows the ways in which the Deng regime grossly violated the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese people, and how capitalism emerged as the dynamic force in today's socioeconomic and cultural life.

Now, Meisner argues, after more than a decade of capitalist reforms, the Chinese spiritual malaise is deepening with the brutal suppression of the 1989 Democracy Movement and its politically repressive aftermath.

This indispensable study of contemporary Chinese politics - from the 1949 Revolution and the founding of the Maoist state to the establishment of Deng's regime and the social consequences of his reforms - is, as well, a formidable analysis of the failure of the world's greatest socialist experiment.