I highly recommend this article on the end of Engagement with China by Orville Schell.

Engagement Post-Mortem

I found the section on Hu Jintao (and Bush) to be particularly noteworthy. The standard story tends to be that Hu and Wen Jiabao were ultimately seen within the Party as too passive when it came to international engagement and too focused on rural development. The result was an enlarged conservative block as more cadres started getting anxious (and very rich) and they pivoted back to the more hardline Xi. Schell traces a different story re-characterizing the passivity of Hu and Wen as evidence of general Party inattentiveness. He locates this period as the primary root of the death of engagement. It’s compelling stuff.

I also found Schell’s descriptions of the remarkable continuities and ingenuities of subsequent American administrations in the final section to be quite thought-provoking.