This sounds like an interesting book, from the WSJ review this past weekend. My main interest was in the keju system (E of the EAST acronym) based on my work, as a practitioner in psychometrics interested in history, of that subarea. I found the author's thesis novel and tenable (one of my major sources for the keju system is the work by Hoi K. Suen of Penn State University, and his argument is that the keju -- and a current incarnation as the national "gaokao" college entrance examination -- shares some characteristics with high stakes testing in the United States).
As argued by Milovan Djilas in 1957, there is often a hierarchy in the classless communist systems, but as seen by upending the two term presidential pact established by Deng Xiaoping perhaps leader K. Jinping has aspirations well beyond the stability component.......