Ian Bremmer chooses to call it the J Curve, but to visualise its contours imagine instead a Nike swoosh. On the vertical axis is the measure of a nation’s stability, and on the horizontal axis is its openness. In a new book — The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall — he applies the J Curve to societies in the throes of change.

Bremmer, who heads the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, and teaches at Columbia University, considers 12 countries, and finds that the J Curve throws up the most intriguing questions when applied to China.

The J Curve essentially maps a country’s transition from closedness to openness. There are two types of stability, says Bremmer: one that accrues because a country is closed, and the other precisely because it is open. “Yet,” he writes, “for a country that is ‘stable because it’s closed’ to become a country that is ‘stable because it’s open,’ it must go through a transitional period of dangerous instability.”

This phase instability can come unforeseen — a natural catastrophe, act of terror, famine, or political unrest because people have managed to communicate between themselves sufficiently in order to dodge official censors. To regain stability, the leadership would have two options: to manage instability and the transition to openness on the right side of the curve, or to quickly revert to that old stability born of closedness on the left side of the curve.

This explains why the swoosh has a more gradual arc on the right: “The left side of the curve is much steeper because a little consolidation and control can provide a lot of stability. It’s more efficient to reestablish order by declaring martial law than by passing legislation that promotes freedom of the press.” But, of course: “In any left-side-of-the-curve state, it is easier to close a country than to open it. But once mature political institutions are fully constructed and embraced by a nation’s people, they are a lot more durable and do far more to protect the viability of the state than any police state tactic can.”

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