A consensus has emerged among America’s policy circles and China specialists that the US policy of engagement to promote the democratization of China has not been successful. Debates abound as to why and what went wrong, as can be seen in the pages of leading foreign policy journals and a plethora of books on a rising China’s challenge to American primacy. Typical is the assessment that western democracies have underestimated “the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party” (Aaron Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, 2022).