This is definitely a great book about China. But, there are some challenges and problems about it.
The challenges: 1) It is so deep that people without a good understanding of the Chinese society would have tremendous difficulties to fully understand it; 2) Most of the content has already been covered by Professor Qin in his public speech. So, people, like me, who have already listened to all of his speeches, would find it quite boring to read-because, on one hand, you don't want to miss a thing, on the other hand, you would not know where would you expect something new. 3) Some of the words are unnecessarily redundant-something a smart scholar as Professor Qin would usually avoid.
The problems: (This is only my personal opinion based on my limited knowledge.) 1) Although I am inspired a lot by Qin's arguments, he's claim that all human would have some shared common sense and a preference for liberty, truth, and democracy is not convincing in my eyes. I think he's very limited by a lack of knowledge in biology and psychology. 2) Some of his argument is really far fetched. For example, he argues that the Chinese culture embrace equality and justice from a linguistic point of view (the last chapter). I wonder does he at least know that there are many different types of organizational justice? We at least differentiate them as: distributive justice, procedure justice, and interpersonal justice. Isn't that very prominent that different culture pay more attention to different types of justice (the heuristic effect)? Isn't that the Chinese society, which has a long history featured with power distance and status difference, clearly emphasis more interpersonal justice rather than the distributive justice, a.k.a., what he means by equality? 3) He argues that collective owned lands have a low efficiency using the reference of a growing ratio of family owned farm in UK and US. However, according to my field study in China. Many farmers working on family owned farms in China are stuck in poverty. Those who live in a collective owned farms are having a much much better life. So, I can't help thinking that his evidence is very biased and he has ignored many contextual factors such as the level of marketization of agricultural products or industrialization.
Above are just some examples of my critiques. There are way more than these. But, overall speaking, it is a great book.