China's Unfinished Economic Revolution offers a fundamentally different interpretation of China's economic reform. The common view that China's gradualistic approach has served it well overlooks the fact that state-owned banks for the last two decades have channeled a large share of sharply rising household savings into what are mostly unreformed, money-losing companies. The result is that several of China's largest financial institutions now are insolvent. To avoid a major domestic banking crisis the book argues that China must recapitalize and restructure its domestic banking system and end the long-standing practice of making lending decisions based on political rather than economic criteria. Nicholas Lardy explains that this course will inevitably be costly in political terms, in part because it will lead for a time to a slower rate of economic growth. But the alternative is even less attractive—permanently slower growth, continued macroeconomic instability, an inability to meet the expectations of the international community for the opening of its domestic financial markets, and insufficient resources to deal with severe environmental deterioration, growing water shortages, and a rapidly aging population. This timely book also analyzes the new reform initiatives China has launched in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, suggests additional steps that must be taken, and evaluates the implications for U.S. policy.

In The Third Revolution, Elizabeth Economy, one of America's leading China scholars, provides an authoritative overview of contemporary China that makes sense of all of the seeming inconsistencies and ambiguities in its policies and actions.

China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

This powerful and meticulously researched study explores the role of rural industry and entrepreneurship in the Chinese economic miracle. Linda Grove considers especially the development of the Gaoyang industrial district, China's best-known rural industrial district of the pre–World War II period. By focusing on one weaving district in North China, she is able to explore in detail the ways in which small industrial firms have accumulated capital, organized their firms, developed nationwide marketing networks, and promoted brands over the last century. Cutting across the conventional divide between studies of "history" and "contemporary economy" and between pre- and post-1949 China, the author persuasively shows the links between traditional Chinese business practices and contemporary entrepreneurial success. The first book in English to explore the world of small-scale business firms in China, it introduces the activities of individual entrepreneurs and firms and examines the structure of industrial organization that has supported the rapid growth of individual firms. Based on several decades of archival research, surveys, and fieldwork, A Chinese Economic Revolution provides an in-depth exploration of Chinese rural industry. Framed by the author's extensive familiarity with rural industrial development in Japan, India, and Europe, the book also offers important comparative perspectives for those interested in global economic history, postsocialist economic performance, and economic development strategies.

For some twenty-five years after 1949, China did not exist and the country was only rediscovered in the 1970s. As China looks set to soar in the new millennium, there is an urgency to understand the world's most populous economy with a billion plus people. This book aims to shed light on the country's rapid industrialization and internationalization by looking at questions such as: Can China sustain its accelerated rate of growth? Can labor supply be sustained at a relatively low wage rate? Can inflow of foreign direct investment be sustained at a high rate, given the consequent exposure to inflation? Will China's domestic market absorb its own output as the limit on the ability to export manufactures to overseas markets is reached? Is China's currency undervalued? Given China's foreign exchange reserves, should the country have a freely convertible currency?

The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.

In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955, Ying Jia Tan explores the fascinating politics of Chinese power consumption as electrical industries developed during seven decades of revolution and warfare. Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civil war, to the 1937 Japanese invasion that robbed China of 97 percent of its generative capacity. Along the way, he demonstrates that power industries became an integral part of the nation's military-industrial complex, showing how competing regimes asserted economic sovereignty through the nationalization of electricity. Based on a wide range of published records, engineering reports, and archival collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 argues that, even in times of peace, the Chinese economy operated as though still at war, constructing power systems that met immediate demands but sacrificed efficiency and longevity. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.