China’s reform era is ending. Primary factors that characterized it-political stability, ideological openness, and speedy economic growth-are unraveling.

Since the 1990s, Beijing’s leaders have firmly declined any fundamental reform of their authoritarian one-party political system, even as a decades-long increase has reshaped China’s economy and society. On the surface, their efforts have been a success. Political turmoil offers toppled former Communist East bloc regimes, internal unrest overtaken about End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining Its Rise Middle East nations, and populist movements risen to problem established Western democracies. China, on the other hand, has appeared a member of family haven of stability and growth.

But as Carl Minzner shows, a closer look at China’s reform period reveals a different truth. Within the last three decades, a frozen politics system offers fueled both rise of entrenched passions within the Communist Party itself, and the organized underdevelopment of establishments of governance among condition and society at large. Economic cleavages have widened. Social unrest provides worsened. Ideological polarization offers deepened.

Now, to handle these looming complications, China’s market leaders are gradually cannibalizing institutional norms and procedures that have shaped the bedrock of the regime’s balance in the reform period.