Minxin Pei is a political scientist who specializes in China's modern development. He is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. His 2006 book, China’s Trapped Transition (2006), explored the difficulties of reforming the country’s political and economic systems. Later, in China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016), he looked at how corruption had grown rampant during the nation's economic development. His forthcoming book, due to be published next year, focuses on the country’s “surveillance state.” Pei earned degrees from the Shanghai International Studies University and the University of Pittsburgh and was awarded a PhD from Harvard University. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a recent conversation.  Minxin Pei.Illustration by Kate Copeland Q: You wrote many years ago about the “trapped transition,” and China’s