In 2009 Amnesty International declined to publish the annual number of Chinese extra-judicial executions because the official statistics are unreliable, but the number has been estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 a year, more than the rest of the world combined. Teng Biao, a disbarred human rights lawyer, has accused the judiciary of bowing to party pressure on its verdicts, which are widely reported to be written before the trial. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates there are 24 reporters in prison for "subversion" and "spreading rumours". Although freedom of speech on the internet is officially guaranteed, those who include  words like Tibet, democracy, Taiwan or Tiananmen may expect arrest, and gay, lesbian and bisexual sites are banned; some of the technology for patrolling the internet was sold to China by Yahoo, Google, and Sun Systems. Forty parents of children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake were detained for demanding compensation and an inquiry into poor building construction. Four teachers and journalists were tried and imprisoned for "subversion" for similar demands after the earthquake. It is dispiriting to list these human rights violations — many of them accumulated from the Chinese and world press by Human Rights Watch — and many readers' eyes will glaze over.

What is worse is that this is a mere sample of such depredations since 2009. Two decades earlier, in 1989, the regime unleashed a national purge on the hundreds of thousands of students and workers who had demonstrated across China in more than 300 cities, from Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Inner Mongolia; some of those detained remain behind bars. As Benjamin Liebman of Columbia Law School observes in Mao's Invisible Hand, "Legal reforms largely reflect state interests rather than the rights of individuals. They have not been designed to impose significant limitations on the state."

But since much the same could be said of the Communist regimes that collapsed after 1989, how has the People's Republic not only survived but prospered? The editors of Mao's Invisible Hand contend that the secret is "guerrilla policy-making," which began in the party's 30 revolutionary years before its 1949 triumph. The Communist forces were forced to adapt to survive as they moved about China's hinterland —including their nearly disastrous Long March of 1934-3 — while resisting the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese, and Chiang again during his American-aided civil war with Mao from 1945 to 1949.

Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann write that in the decades after the Communist triumph, continuing "secrecy, versatility, speed and surprise", bear the "signature Maoist stamp that conceives of policy as a process of ceaseless change, tension management, continual experimentation, and ad hoc adjustments".

And violence. In his terrifying and detailed chapter on crime and punishment, "Turning Rubbish into Something Useful" in The People's Republic at 60, Klaus Mühlhahn writes: "A fundamental distinction needed always to be made between ‘us', or  ‘the people', and ‘them'...enemies of the people' [who] were subject to ‘democratic dictatorship'...counter-revolutionaries needed to be killed because, in the words of Mao, they were ‘deeply hated by the masses and owed the masses heavy blood-debts'." Mühlhahn estimates 800,000 "counter-revolutionaries" were executed. That is frightening enough.