rcmnd

The PartyBook

by Richard McGregor

Who uses, recommends or left The Party, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Brad Setser
Brad Setser is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.He served in top trade and economic roles in the Biden and Obama administrations.
recommended

Uh it's by a friend of mine, Richard McGregor, uh long time um [snorts] Beijing correspondent for the Financial who wrote a book called The Party. And he really showed that you can't understand modern China without understanding the modern Chinese Communist Party.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “The China Shock 2.0” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-brad-setser.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-08-21·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.