Until the late 2010s, there was a widespread view that China’s rapid growth and even its political and economic model would make China the number-one power in the world by 2030. But Xi Jinping has pulled back from the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and China is facing growing problems: slowing growth, ballooning debt, endemic corruption, mass dissent, demographic decline and institutional sclerosis. Xi Jinping is preparing China for war, militarizing China’s foreign policy. The central argument of this book, when first published, was that just such developments might well occur.

Monk’s emphasis on the critical importance of rigorous methodology sets Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China apart in the field and has been powerfully vindicated by developments in China and its foreign relations since the book was first published in 2005. It is a primer for the kind of thinking policy elites need to be doing now.

Professor John Fitzgerald, author of Awakening China: Politics, Class and Culture in the Nationalist Revolution (1996) and Cadre Country: How China Became the Communist Party (2022).

In 2005, Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China grappled squarely with the nature of China’s authoritarian institutions and the dynamism of its material rise. But unlike almost all commentaries then, it rejected simplistic Western hopes and expectations for China based on deterministic and naïve assumptions about China’s domestic and foreign trajectory. In an important and timely release, the 2nd edition offers a profound reminder that different possibilities can be imagined for China.

Dr John Lee, former senior China adviser to Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

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