Chenggang Xu is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economic and Institutions. A 2011 paper analyzing how China's institutions shaped the trajectory of China's economic reforms won him China's top economics prize. His new book, Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism, is out August 31. It’s a work he says encapsulates over half a century of his thinking on the totalitarian nature of communism, a research topic he began pursuing in th