'The Industrialization of Rural China' highlights the economic & social achievements of the Maoist regime. Using a constructed dataset covering China's 2000 plus counties & complemented by a detailed econometric study of county-level industrialization in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong & Jiangsu, the author shows that history mattered.

Small-scale industries in rural areas in China are today an essential element of regional development programs. This monograph analyzes two main development strategies: technology choices in a number of industrial sectors and the integrated rural development strategy.

"A distinctive and important contribution."—Thomas P. Bernstein, author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages

This book is a comprehensive and positive study of the special pattern of China's industrialization and economic development, covering all of the relevant, main policies (more than one hundred) from 1949 to the twenty-first century.

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.

This collection of papers presented at an international conference in 1987 provides a comprehensive analysis of China's booming rural non-state industrial sector, both collective and private.