Chinese Communist Party  “Chinese law is a big joke.” So says Ai
Weiwei, China’s premier artist, in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,
a documentary which was released late last month. In recent
years, Ai has been the most prominent critic of his government’s
repression and lack of transparency.     The Partial Reformer
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of ChinaBy Ezra F. Vogel
(Belknap Press, 876 pp., $39.95)  Revolutionaries get all the
attention, but reform is much harder. A reformer has to reshape
a rigid structure without breaking it. Before Deng Xiaoping,
only Kemal Atatürk in the twentieth century managed to do this.
Others, like Nasser and the Shah of Iran, left key parts of the
old system intact, or, like Gorbachev, destroyed the regime in
trying to save it. The China that Deng inherited from Mao Zedong
was just such a brittle system.    -- Alan Wolfe dissects David
Brooks's new book. -- A Chinese expat executes the first prank
to include both the Chinese Communist Party and Charlie Sheen
(and his dad, "who