How China Escaped Shock Therapy

Winner of the 2021 Joan Robinson Prize awarded by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. One of the most consequential economic debates in China over the direction of reform took place in the 1980s and focused on how markets should be created. The outcome of that debate set the pattern for much of China's subsequent economic reforms. Isabella Weber, drawing on interviews of the participants and others together with many new sources of unpublished and published information, does a masterful job of explaining how this debate evolved and its ultimate impact. DWIGHT H. PERKINS, Harvard University, Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development, 1980-1995 This superb book presents the most compelling interpretation I have read of the sources of Chinese gradualism and its success in fostering economic growth and transformation while preserving enough social cohesion to hold the Chinese society together. It is the product of an independent, inquisitive, open mind-the only type that can hope to grasp the phenomenon that is modern China. It is also the work of a first-rate economist, in the best sense of that term. JAMES K. GALBRAITH, The University of Texas at Austin, former Chief Technical adviser to China's State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform Isabella Weber's book gives an excellent historical overview of China's economic statecraft bringing the reader to the crucial period of market reforms and to the decision to avoid the full implementation of the neoliberal agenda, thus setting the stage for the fastest and longest growth in world history. BRANKO MILANOVIC, LSE and CUNY, former Lead Economist, World Bank Research Department Isabella Weber succeeds in offering a powerful account of China's reform-era market creation that is of acute interest to economists and historians alike. Her book is a call to economists to ponder the relevance of political economy with its European roots in classical economics of the early modern era and with Chinese roots in a period almost two millennia earlier. R. BIN WONG, Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Distinguished Professor of History China's debates in the 1980s about reform of the non-market economy are centrally important to understanding global political economy in the 21st century. The resolution of the debates about the 'Big Bang' set China on the course of pragmatic system reform ('groping for stones to cross the river') that has remained in place ever since. Isabella Weber's study is unique. It uses information not only from a wide array of written documents but also from extensive interviews with participants in the debates. Her remarkable book provides a rich, balanced and scholarly analysis which illuminates the complex reality of this critically important period in modern world history. PETER NOLAN, University of Cambridge, Founding Director of the University's Centre of Development Studies This book is a must read for anybody interested in the history of China's economic reforms, and I warmly recommend it. It is a highly readable and extremely valuable contribution to the debate on China's early reform efforts in the 1980s. The book's most valuable contribution draws from Weber's extensive interviews with the reformers. BERT HOFMAN, former World Bank Country Director for China, Mongolia and Korea Her efforts to interview the participants and her extensive research, in both public and private archives, make her account the standard against which future books will be measured. REBECCA KARL, London Review of Books How China Escaped Shock Therapy constitutes an impressive work of intellectual history. Weber presents an exceedingly thorough, nuanced and even exciting account of the debate, which was fluid and constantly changing. CARL RISKIN, China Quarterly Weber's book offers a fascinating account of struggles over economic policy in China in the 1980s. It is all the more fascinating to read Weber's subtle recounting of this debate because it is with us still today in debates about inflation in Europe and the U.S. amid the COVID recovery. Weber's subtle, lucid and evenhanded treatment is to render 40-year-old debates in reform-era China neither exotic nor outdated, but strikingly contemporary. ADAM TOOZE, Chartbook and Noema This tension between China's rise and its only 'partial assimilation' defines our present moment, she writes. The purpose of How China Escaped Shock Therapy is to explain this divergence, which Weber does very well. JOEL ANDREAS, New Left Review