A»Who’s Who« of Chinese Intellectuals and What They Think about China MARK LEONARD: What Does China Think? London 2008 Fourth Estate/ Harper Collins, 224 pp. HEINRICH BÖLL STIFTUNG(Ed.): Wie China debattiert. Neue Essays und Bilder aus China Berlin 2009 hbs , 200 pp. C hina is shaking the world. This may be a platitude, but it is no less true for all that. On the one hand, China gives rise to incomprehension for the prosecution of dissidents or the execution of foreigners under obscure circumstances, while on the other hand, it is keeping the engine of world growth running and trying to spur domestic demand, a move which may help to correct global imbalances. In Copenhagen, German Chancellor Angela Merkel encountered a»very self confident China« and the world had to take notice once again that almost noth­ing can be managed in international politics without China. Many in the West allege»global player affectations«( Financial Times Deutschland, December 20, 2009) and regard China as the next big»muscle man«( Tagesspiegel, January 31, 2010). These characterizations, which often reveal some uncertainty with regard to how to handle the rise of China, have changed in recent years, however.»Does China matter?«(Gerald Segal) was the question a decade ago, but today it is obvi­ous that we have to take China seriously if we want to cope with the problems of the early twenty-first century. Because of its growing influence, China will shape the world, to a certain extent, whether the world likes it or not. Therefore it would be wise to reach an understanding of how politics work in China and es­pecially what ideas and people influence Chinese politics. Two recently published books seek to examine what Chinese intellectuals and policy advisers think and what ideas they have about China’s future. The first is Mark Leonard’s»What Does China Think?,« in preparation for which the author conducted interviews with various Chinese scholars and members of think tanks. The other,»How China Debates,« is a volume of essays written by Chinese scholars, which have been translated for the first time into German and edited by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. For Leonard, China is a new»shaper of world order« and its rise»is the big story of our age and its after-effects could echo down for generations to come« (p. 5). For him, this is why it is important to know»What(…) China think[s]?« The title is a little exaggerated and misleading, because the reader is not intro­170 Rezensionen/Book Reviews ipg 2/2010