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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interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization.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.
Awards
Winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021
Winner of the 2022 Best Book in Interdisciplinary Studies Award of the International Studies Association
Winner of the Keynes Prize 2023
Hans-Matthöfer Prize 2024
“Isabella M. 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
“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Weber’s subtle, lucid and evenhanded treatment is to render 40-year-old debates in reform-era China neither exotic nor outdated, but strikingly contemporary.”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
Weber argues persuasively that their role in debates over economic reform has not been adequately recognised in China or elsewhere. She also makes a convincing case for the 1980s as a time when such debates were possible. 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.
Weber offers a valuable corrective to such essentializing narratives. She provides a fine-grained account of the contentious economic reform debates that took place in China in the 1980s, and situates them in a larger historical and conceptual context. Unlike most of the former Soviet bloc and the former Third World, China did not suffer the debilitating effects of neoliberal shock therapy, and for Weber, the story of how China avoided this fate is key to what makes it different today.
One of the great merits of Weber's painstaking trawl through the historical record is that it redresses the balance… she recuperates the historical significance of a generation of intellectuals whose careers were twice derailed, first by the Cultural Revolution and then by turmoil around Tiananmen.
The Chinese economic miracle was based on ignoring advice from Central and Eastern Europe… China escaped shock therapy, as the title of Weber's book underlines. Liberalisation took place, not in a single Big Bang, but gradually, over a period of decades, as Weber demonstrates.
An excellent book by political economist Isabella Weber… provides an intellectual history of how China steered through the post-Mao period by undertaking a series of reforms that eventually set the stage for rapid economic growth. At the core of Weber's documentation is the role of ideas and how key policymakers are influenced by competing notions of pragmatism, tradition, and theory.
Weber's book is insightful in showing the debates on policy among the CCP leaders about what direction to go and the factors that dominated their thoughts.
Isabella M. Weber's book is a highly readable and valuable contribution to the debate on China's early reform efforts. The book's main contribution is its detailed account of the domestic debate on economic reforms between the gradualist reformers and rapid reformers in the 1980s, as well as tracing the intellectual antecedents of both groups.
Weber has written an illuminating book on China's resistance to neoliberal economic thought.
Z wielkim zainteresowaniem zerkam w kierunku nowej książki „How China Escaped Shock Therapy?” Isabelli Weber, ekonomistki z Uniwersytetu Massachusetts w Amherst. Jak oni to zrobili? Dlaczego jest tak, że kraje takie jak Polska, Węgry czy Jugosławia musiały najpierw zaliczyć glebe i znieść wiele niepotrzebnych społecznych katuszy, zanim przestawiły się na gospodarkę rynkową? Chiny miały inaczej. Też skoczyły w kapitalizm. Ale na własnych prawach.
…few have looked into it as meticulously as Isabella M. Weber. In her wide-reaching How China Escaped Shock Therapy, we find a map which sheds light on how the Chinese government decided on an ‘experimental gradualism’ rather than shock therapy under the influence of Chinese traditional wisdom and contemporary intellectuals.
Weber presents an exceedingly thorough, nuanced and even exciting account of the debate, which was fluid and constantly changing. The reader feels immersed in its day-to-day flow and even though the outcome is known, Weber instills a sense of suspense about what would happen in the end.
Widening the cast of characters beyond Mao and Deng to other factions within the state, Kelly and Weber show how China's political economy was shaped by vibrant internal debates and profound intellectual shifts over multiple generations, complicating received views about the contours of Chinese communism.
The detailed analysis of the 1980s market-reform debates offered by How China Escaped Shock Therapy is insightful and illuminating, and Weber's evidence for the roles played by economists in providing theories and policy suggestions to key party leaders is especially helpful.