In recent years, popular wisdom has held that opening American markets to Chinese goods was the best way to promote democracy in Beijing--that the Communist Party's grip would quickly weaken as increasingly affluent Chinese citizens embraced American values. That popular wisdom was wrong. As Eamonn Fingleton shows in this devastating book, the culmination of twenty years of research and study, instead of America changing China--i.e., making China more democratic--China is changing America.

While the Chinese people's rising affluence is, of course, an occasion for wholehearted...