Synopses & Reviews
Private and foreign economic sectors (termed non-state sectors in China) have been the main engine of China's phenomenal economic growth. Built on rich data analyses, this book offers a fresh and in-depth explanation of how China's pro-reform leaders successfully launched controversial policies to promote these dynamic sectors, managed leadership conflict, and ensured reform in the provinces and rapid growth in the nation.
Review
“This book is a solid, in-depth study of Chinas successful reform strategies that have managed leadership conflict, guided economic reforms, and ensured rapid, sustained economic growth for more than a quarter century. . . . Overall, this is a painstakingly well-researched and insightful book. . . . [It] is highly recommended to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, policy markers, and professionals specializing in economics, the Chinese economy, and public policy in China, as well as in transition economics and development economics.”--Peter Yang, China Review International
“This book provides a nice account of policy making at the central and provincial levels that led or contributed to the fast growth of the nonstate sector in China over the past decades. . . . the book is a good addition to the literature on reform in contemporary China. It should be of interest to those who wish to understand economic reform and development in China.”--Economic Development and Cultural Change"To the by-now standard insights that Chinas economic reform has succeeded by its decentralized and gradualist approach, Hongyi Lai adds the crucial insight that Chinese leaders chose carefully, and by criteria we can now identify, where to initiate reforms. Not all coastal provinces were first encouraged to experiment with reforms, nor were all sectors involved. By identifying and explaining how Deng and his associates chose their targets and sustained a reform-tolerating coalition at the top, Lai adds immeasurably to comparativists understanding of just how the “Chinese miracle” was crafted. To all students who pursue the pressing moral question of how countries can be lifted rapidly out of poverty, Lai offers compelling and important new answers. Lais detailed, in-depth and utterly convincing analysis of this crucial case supplies the crucial complement to the great debates and theories of scholars like Easterly, Sachs, and Stiglitz."
--Ronald Rogowski, Interim Vice Provost, Director of the Center for International Relations, Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles "How did Chinas political leaders manage to introduce and sustain market reforms and opening? This study helps answer this important question by exploring the interconnections between economics and politics. It is a valuable contribution to the literature on Chinas reforms."--Susan L. Shirk, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego "Hongyi Lai has produced a wonderful study of Chinas reform process, stressing the way in which leadership strategies and divisions shaped the growth of the economy. It was leadership, Lai argues, that led China out of the Maoist wilderness and into a period of sustained growth. Divisions within the leadership generated ups and downs in the course of reform, but ultimately it was Deng Xiaoping, who, in the course of adopting strategies to moderate this conflict, found a way to move forward incrementally, minimizing conservative opposition. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the political economy reform."--Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University "Besides its use for understanding China's transition, this volume contributes to an understanding of the dynamics of economic transition more generally, particularly in the context of changes initiated and carried out by the very governmental bureaucracy that lorded over the pre-reform economic structure. Unfortunately, similar studies of the Meiji Restoration or transitions out of feudal structures in Europe are not available; nevertheless, this study has implications for these past, as well as future, transitions.”--Choice
Synopsis
Built on rich data analyses, this book offers a fresh and in-depth explanation of how China's pro-reform leaders successfully launched controversial policies to promote private and foreign economic sectors, managed leadership conflict, and ensured reform in the provinces and rapid growth in the nation.
About the Author
Hongyi H. Lai is a research fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.
Table of Contents
Economic Transition and the Case of China * Policies Toward the Non-State Sectors, 1978 to the Present * Elite Conflict, Reformist Strategy, and Policy Cycles * Installing Technocratic Young Leaders * Opening the Door: Selective and Showcase Liberalization * Extending the Open Policy: The Nationwide Approach * Provincial Reform Initiatives: Causes for Variation * Divergent Reform Paths in Two Provinces * How China's Leaders Made Reforms Happen