February Meetup: The Rise and Fall of the East by Yasheng Huang

In "A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023” — “The Rise and Fall of the East” — MIT professor Yasheng Huang examines China's historical balance between stability, diversity, and prosperity, highlighting how current leadership threatens this delicate equilibrium. From the ancient civil service exam to the modern Chinese Communist Party's personnel management system, autocracies have wielded tools to enforce uniformity but at the cost of stifled creativity. Huang illustrates how China's most prosperous periods occurred when scale (bureaucratic size) was balanced with scope (idea diversity), emphasizing the importance of this balance for sustained dynamism.