Written by an international team of experts, this important and interesting text gives vital insights into China's likely development and international influence in the next decade.

This comprehensive, interpretive economic history presents the dramatic recent changes in China's approach to economic organization and development in an historical context.

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important. As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning.

This book looks back to 40 years ago for the whole history of China’s reform and opening-up and focuses on the role change of China in the relationship with outside world. In the first half part, the author explores China’s economic reform and opening-up policy from theoretical analysis and systematic interpretation. In the second part, the author aims to present how China’s international roles have changed in recent years and the Chinese appeal and purpose of participating in and improving global governance procedure. The author answers the question of why China has obtained miraculous achievements after its reform and opening-up from academic perspective and provides representative cases with profound but not obscure theoretical interpretation. It is a must-read for anyone who is interested in contemporary China’s economy and foreign affairs.

This book and its companion volume offer a better understanding of the lessons that Indian policymakers can learn from China’s economic experience over the last 40 years. The aim of the two books together is to evaluate China’s incremental reforms and how these reforms have impacted on the Chinese economy, based on a classical rather than from a neoclassical perspective using a case study method. In this second volume, the author examines knowledge creation, knowledge spillovers and entrepreneurship across both China and India. The comparative study places the theoretical analysis of the previous volume in a real-world context of how China’s economic reforms since 1978 have actually impacted on the country. Its real-world findings of the Chinese economy present a complete perspective on China’s lessons for India as well as at a global context.

China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.