For China, 2012 was a humbling year. When the history of China’s reform era is written, this moment may prove to be a pivot point, a time when the myths that China and the world had adopted about the politics and economics of the People’s Republic began to wash away, leaving blunt facts about what China’s idiosyncratic national system has and has not achieved. Here are some of the myths that collapsed this year:

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1. China’s political system has the efficiency and consensus to produce far-sighted decisions that Washington can only envy. Faced with our own gridlock and polarization, Americans are understandably eager to find a rhetorical cudgel, and we entered 2012 repeating the line that Chinese leaders had become all that ours were not: ambitious, visionary, willing to pull for a larger purpose. In last year’s State of the Union, President Obama invoked China as the “home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer. “So, yes,” Obama said, “the world has changed.” And he was not wrong. But this year added some sobering facts about the haste, waste, and corruption associated with China’s Great Leap. When a bridge collapsed in August, killing three people and injuring five, it was the sixth bridge collapse in a little over a year. The authorities blamed overloaded trucks, but it turned out that the concrete had been adulterated with sticks and plastic bags, the kind of corner-cutting that Chinese regulators have found in the nation’s enormous railway construction project. For this and other reasons that follow, the myth of China’s political efficiency can be retired.

2. China is destined for a hard landing. Take your pick—manufacturing, retail sales, investment—all signs suggest China has postponed another opportunity to go over an economic cliff. “Economic activity is back, and growth has bottomed out,” the economists Xianfang Ren and Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight wrote this week. But, while a recovery is welcome, there is little sign that Beijing has made the hardest decision of all: to upend powerful state-owned enterprises and unlock the dynamic private sector. Until then, China’s economy will still look an awful lot like an overloaded eighteen-wheeler on a mountain road.

3. There is good corruption and bad corruption, and China’s corruption hasn’t slowed things down. Economists see signs that so much money has gone to waste and corruption or simply to poor uses that China now needs to spend two or three dollars in financing to generate a dollar of growth in the G.D.P—a ratio that is up from one to one just six years ago.

4. The U.S.-China relationship is too broad and pragmatic to be shaken by human rights. In May, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest and, after a car chase, ended up in the care of the American embassy in Beijing at the very moment that the United States and China were supposed to be talking about strategy and economics. After what seemed to be an elegant solution to get him out of the embassy, he upended the deal by phoning a Capitol Hill hearing from his hospital bed to advocate on his own behalf: “I want to come to the U.S. to rest. I have not had a rest in ten years,” he said. He prevailed, and he is now a fellow at N.Y.U. Most recently, after Chen’s nephew was sentenced to three years in jail, Chen released a video to urging his countrymen to follow his lead: “Don’t expect some good emperor to bestow the right upon us, or some upright officials to defend our rights. God helps those who help themselves. Our fate is actually in our own hands.”

5. In the fast-changing relations between men and women in China, the losers are the “leftover women.” For all the inches of text devoted to the subject, “leftover women”—a pool of educated thirtyish women who can not find a partner in China—is a concept invented and sustained largely by men. Take a look at the numbers, and you find real demographic challenge: leftover men.

6. Finally, China has a political leader who thinks like us. Xi Jinping, who took the helm of the Chinese Communist Party this month, has the bearing and style of a man from this planet. Where Hu Jintao, his predecessor, exuded a kind of bloodless pallor, Xi moves with the bodily vocabulary that pleases American politicians: he watches sports; he kicks a ball when it is presented to him. But behind the Brylcreem, Xi has the makings of a more complicated figure for a more complicated time, a nationalist with strategic and historical motivations to assert a more muscular Chinese position on the world stage. As the economy slows, Xi may face more pressure to seek refuge in the flag, and that may come to shape his image more than his facility on the rope line. One of the first actions on his watch—raising the stakes in the South China Sea—has not reassured the United States.

7. Compared to Americans, the Chinese are cautious, risk averse. We think of ourselves as the rugged individualists, but, as I discovered in Macau, China’s boom runs on risk. In a set of experiments, the behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee looked at Chinese and American attitudes toward financial risk and found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. (The Americans agreed.) But when they tested the groups, the cliché proved to be false, and the Chinese took substantially larger risks than Americans of similar means. What does it mean? More to learn, but it’s a good place to start.

8. The Party has succeeded in blunting the transformative effect of the Internet. With the departure of Google, and the expanding censorship apparatus, it was beginning to look as if China’s digital strategy of allowing the Internet to exist within the confines of Party control was working. That verdict was premature. The Arab Spring demonstrated that a motivated, angry minority can have a disproportionate effect on political stability, and in China that means that the Internet doesn’t need to be unrestricted to have outsized impact. Middle-class environmental protests in Ningbo; repeated exposures of official corruption; and many other cases coördinated and amplified by the Web demonstrate a new form of leverage on the regime that will only grow. More important, a generation is growing up to believe that official information is inherently suspect.

9. The Party itself will be transformed by the Internet. Precisely because the Party realizes the potential power of the Web, it has moved effectively to erect the world’s most formidable obstacles to connectivity. Censors, slowdowns, arrests—it has a powerful effect. Whether political activism will change China will hinge on how many people take their actions offline—and how the Party responds when they do.

10. Local bureaucrats might be corrupt, but decision-makers at the top are carefully selected and have deep public approval. “If we speak candidly,” wrote Deng Yuwen, a deputy editor of the Party-run newspaper called Study Times, “this decade has seeded or created massive problems, and the problems are even more numerous than the achievements.” The Bo Xilai debacle exposed a gangland element to Party politics that reaches to the top, and the revelations about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth leaves no doubt about the extent of self-dealing. Inside and outside the Party, reformists are calling not only for economic liberalization but also for credible efforts to end the two-tiered society, to resume political reform, and to narrow the widening wealth gap. China faces more urgent threats to growth and social stability than any time since the uprising at Tiananmen Square, in 1989. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of strikes and riots and what Chinese officials call “mass incidents,” doubled to a hundred eighty thousand a year—and that will continue to grow until the political culture improves.

Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photograph: AFP/Getty.