Media Highlights
Author Interviews
Bloomberg | Profile by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal | June 9, 2023
“Preiskontrollen? Der Vorschlag einer deutschen Ökonomin kommt an. Isabella Weber hat die Inflations-Debatte neue Impulse gegeben.”
Bloomberg | Profile by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal | June 8, 2023
“Isabella Weber Explains the Big Rethink on What Causes Inflation. 'Excuseflation' is everywhere now.”
The Times | Profile by Mehreen Khan | May 8, 2023
“Lone voice on inflation grows louder. A star economist says the key is not to raise interest rates but to target corporate greed.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung | Portrait by Bastian Brinkmann| October 29, 2022
“Isabella Weber hat die Gaspreisbremse erfunden. Erst wurde sie dafür ausgelacht. Nun hört die Bundesregierung auf die Ökonomin. Über eine erstaunliche Karriere.”
DER SPIEGEL | Portrait by Ines Zottel | September 29, 2022
“Soll der Staat die Energiepreise in der Krise regulieren? »Einfach dumm«, twitterte Nobelpreisträger Paul Krugman über diesen Vorschlag der jungen Ökonomin Isabella Weber. Heute folgt auch die Bundesregierung ihrem Rat.”
Bloomberg’s ‘Odd Lots’ | Interview by Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthal | September 29, 2021
”Weber discusses China’s Vision for Making Markets Work.”
China-Britain Business Focus | Interview by Paul French | September 1, 2021
“The arguments over reform in China throughout the 1980s and since have been much commented upon both within China and abroad. Now, the reform movement has its most complete history to date in Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Isabella Weber’s new book ‘How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate’ (Routledge). The book is a deep-dive into China’s post-1976 economics with a staggering array of interviewees including both domestic economists and those that advised them.
‘How China Escaped Shock Therapy’ is a must-read if you want to comprehend China’s contemporary economy in all its complexity and understand where reform might be headed in China’s short and medium-term.”
Bloomberg’s ‘Bloomberg Businessweek Podcast’ | Interview by Katie Greifeld | August 18, 2021
“Bloomberg News Cross Asset Reporter Katie Greifeld and Isabella Weber discuss China's crackdown on tech companies.”
The Wire China | Interview by David Barboza | August 8, 2021
“Isabella M. Weber is a political economist, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as well as the author of a highly acclaimed book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (Routledge). Her book, which has won plaudits from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the historian Adam Tooze and Harvard's renowned political economist and China expert Dwight Perkins, details the discussions that shaped China's historic reforms of the 1980s, and why it ultimately rejected a big bang approach to changing its system.”
Jacobin | Interview by Daniel Zamora | August 2, 2021
“The single most stunning economic story of the last half-century has been the rise of China. Its state-led development has unleashed an explosive economic expansion unprecedented in modern history.
But the astonishing growth record is far from a triumph of the free market. In How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers a compelling and fascinating account of the economic reforms and debates in China over the last fifty years.
She demonstrates how, by choosing an alternative path to the “shock therapy” that swallowed up the ex-Soviet bloc of the 1990s, China has avoided the kind of decline in state capacity that’s made COVID-19 such a disaster for the West.
Mixing extensive historical and economic original research, Weber’s account gives us a rich understanding of the unique path pursued by the Chinese Communist Party and its effect on the world’s largest working class.”
Salon24’s ‘Woś w Szerszym Planie’ | Interview Rafał Woś | July 21, 2021
“Dlaczego Chińczykom udało się uniknąć szoku w czasie transformacji systemowej i i gdzie są dziś Chiny gospodarczo- czy to jeszcze socjalizm czy już kapitalizm? Z Isabellą Weber, ekonomistką z University of Massachusetts i autorką książki „How China escape shock terapy” (Jak Chiny ustrzegły się terapii szokowej) rozmawia Rafał Woś.”
O Globo | Interview by André Duchiade | July 18, 2021
“Na década de 1980, um dos grandes debates entre os líderes chineses que sucederam Mao Tsé-tung era como reformar a economia e gerar crescimento. A China deveria adotar uma terapia de choque que destruísse o funcionamento da economia socialista, ou poderia usar mecanismos da economia planificada para assim criar um mercado?
Como essa discussão se desenrolou e conduziu a uma política diferente da seguida pelas ex-repúblicas soviéticas e o Leste Europeu é o tema de um dos livros mais comentados no campo da economia deste ano: "How China Escaped Shock Therapy" ("Como a China escapou da terapia de choque").
Sua autora, a professora de Economia Isabella Weber, da Universidade de Massachusetts em Amherst, ainda se surpreende com o sucesso de sua obra de estreia, uma das indicações de leitura do Financial Times. Em entrevista ao GLOBO, ela fala sobre a economia chinesa ontem e hoje, e sobre o que Pequim aprendeu com o Brasil.”
The Dig Radio | Interview by Daniel Denvir | July 13, 2021
“How China rejected neoliberal orthodoxy and became the new workshop of the world. Dan interviews economist Isabella Weber on her book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate.”
INET’s ‘Economics and Beyond’ | Interview by Rob Johnson | July 12, 2021
“I’m here today with Isabella Weber, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We’re here to talk about many things, but her marvelous new book on China. And I underscore marvelous, called How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate has come out this year and it’s causing quite a stir. Many of my friends have been knocking on my door, “You got to read this book. You got to read this book.” I did. Now I’m saying it to you, “You got to read this book. You got to read this book.””
Left Business Observer’s ‘Behind the News’ | Interview by Doug Henwood | July 8, 2021
“Isabella Weber, author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy, on Chinese economic reform debates and how the country dodged post-Soviet-style collapse.”
SupChina’s ‘The Sinica Podcast’ | Interview by Kaiser Kuo | July 8, 2021
“This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history — the decade of the 1980s — when a fierce debate took place between “package reformers” supporting sweeping price liberalization and gradualists who argued that state participation in the market was critical to dampen inflation and maintain social stability. It also sheds light on the run-up to the student-led demonstrations of 1989.”
Bloomberg’s ‘Bloomberg New Economy Daily’ | Interview by Andrew Browne | May 22, 2021
“In the closing decades of the 20th century, the prevailing wisdom among Western economists was that post-Communist countries should hasten their transformation into market economies by pushing “Big Bang” price reforms.
Had China listened to that advice, it may well have ended up like Russia— an economic disaster, argues Isabella Weber, the author of the new book, “How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate.””
Tribune Magazine’s ‘Politics, Theory, Other’ | Interview by Alex Doherty | May 1, 2021
“At the end of the 1980s, China's leaders came close to implementing the kind of economic shock therapy reforms that a few years later caused a social and economic catastrophe in the former Soviet Union and much of eastern Europe. A moment of enormous significance for Chinese and world history, Isabella Weber explains how and why China came to the brink of initiating an economic "big bang", and why ultimately the leadership chose to pursue a gradualist process of market reform instead.”
IPPR Progressive Review | Interview by Raffaele Danna | July 10, 2019
“Isabella M. Weber is currently a lecturer in economics at Goldsmiths, University of London and will join the University of Massachusetts Amherst as assistant professor in Economics in 2019. Her book on China’s market reform debates is forthcoming with Routledge.”
‘Bloomberg Businessweek Podcast’ | Interview by Tim Stenovec | May 28, 2021
“Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses her book “How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate” about China's gradual, cautious and pragmatic approach to economic reforms as opposed to policies adopted by other communist countries.”
Author Op-Eds
Selected Media Coverage
‘America’s inflation problem is weirdly hard to fix’ | Vox | By Emily Stewart | March 22, 2022
““We already had pretty quickly increasing energy prices and commodity prices which now have, of course, exploded, so you get another round of intense cost pressures that affect a wide range of industries,” said Isabella Weber, an economist at UMass Amherst.”
‘Weak Minds’ | Haydar Khan’s ‘The Scrum’ | By Haydar Khan | October 18, 2021
“If Thiel wants to learn how China leapfrogged the U.S., a suggestion would be to read Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy (Routledge, 2021)”
‘China in 1983: a Miracle Waiting to Happen?’ | New Statesman | By Adam Tooze | July 27, 2021
“Weber’s new book is as good as everyone is saying it is.” (Chartbook Top Links #1)
‘Why There is No Solution to our Age of Crisis without China.’ | New Statesman | By Adam Tooze | July 21, 2021
“As tantalising as the prospects of China’s socialist market economy were, the process of reform was always also a question of power. As Isabella Weber shows in How China Escaped Shock Therapy (2021), Western-inspired reformers such as Wu Jinglian relished the prospect of full-scale overthrow of the communist system. Eastern European activists, including George Soros, envisioned China as a battering ram with which to breach the Soviet fortress.”
‘China’s Hyperinflation.’ | Adam Tooze’s ‘Chartbook’ | By Adam Tooze | July 11, 2021
“Weber argues that the stability of the CCP regime today owes much to the rejection of shock therapy a la Russe... Instead China opted for a gradualist program of price liberalization ... This more cautious and ultimately far more successful approach was justified in the eyes of CCP experts by concerns about inflation. And that in turn owed much to the lessons learned by the Communists during the period of World War II and the civil war.”
‘China Academics Accelerate Efforts to Promote Beijing’s Government-Led Economic Model’ | South China Morning Post | By Frank Tang | June 6, 2021
““The approach that China has taken in developing its own model suggests the China model can’t simply be exported,” said Weber, author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate.”
‘Stabilisation and Growth without Much Reforms’ | Business Recorder | By Omer Javed | June 4, 2021
“In a recently published book ‘How China escaped shock therapy: the market reform debate’, Isabella M. Weber pointed out in this regard: ‘China’s deviation from the neoliberal state lies not in the size of the Chinese state but in the nature of its economic governance. …In contrast, the Chinese state uses the market as a tool in the pursuit of its larger development goals.’”
‘Economics & Marginalia: June 4, 2021’ | Center for Global Development | By Ranil Dissanayake | June 4, 2021
“There is history, economics and politics in equal measure here, brought together harmoniously, prompted by Isabella Weber’s new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy.”
‘1979 in Reverse’ | New Left Review | By Cédric Durand | June 1, 2021
“As Isabella Weber documents for the 1980s in How China Escaped Shock Therapy (2021), the balancing act of the CCP road to capitalism was grounded in a debate about the strategy of market reforms. On several occasions, the option of full-blown liberalization was considered, but ultimately set aside. Instead, the PRC engaged in capitalist globalization while keeping what Lenin called the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ under state control.”
‘Vì sao Trung Quốc siết 'vòng kim cô' với tiền ảo?’ | Baohomnay | By Hoàng Dương | May 22, 2021
“Hai xu hướng trên chứng tỏ xu hướng chính sách tài chính hỗ trợ nền kinh tế thực (serving the real economy), khi thị trường tài chính số phát triển bùng nổ khó kiểm soát, theo giáo sư Isabella Weber, tác giả cuốn sách “How China Escaped Shock Therapy””
‘Arts & Culture Briefs: UMass Amherst Professor Debuts New Book’ | Daily Gazette | May 20, 2021
“Weber’s book argues that China, one of the world’s poorest nations at the time of the 1976 death of its longtime leader, Mao Zedong, rejected the advice of prominent Western economists for the kind of economic “shock therapy” that led to chaos in former Communist countries like Russia.
Instead, Weber writes, China’s leaders instituted more gradual, unique economic reforms beginning in the 1980s that lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty and produced annual growth rates exceeding 10 percent.”
‘Widmo krąży nad światem. Widmo Zimnej Wojny 2.0’ | Magazyn Spider's Web+ | By Sylwia Czubkowska | January 18, 2021
“O nowej zimnej wojnie mówi się wszędzie. „Rozdzielenie” stało się nowym hasłem opisującym możliwość rozpadu gospodarczego między Stanami Zjednoczonymi a Chinami. Brzmi to tak, jakby dezintegracja dwóch największych gospodarek świata mogła zostać przeprowadzona w jednym prostym kroku: jak rozłączenie połączenia między dwoma wagonami pociągu – pisała kilka tygodni temu w brytyjskim dzienniku The Guardian Isabella Weber, ekonomistka i autorska książki „How China Escaped Shock Therapy”.”
‘America Abandoned its Economic Prophet. The World Embraced Him.’ | Foreign Policy | By James K. Galbraith | January 15, 2021
“In her forthcoming book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella Weber demonstrates that China made an explicit choice in the 1980s to shun Friedman’s free market radicalism in favor of Galbraith’s pragmatism and gradualism. China’s post-Mao-era planners made a detailed study of American wartime price controls …and maintained a central role for large state-owned but autonomously managed corporations in their development strategy.”
‘Nach Corona ist vor Corona’ | WOZ Die Wochenzeitung | By Ralf Ruckus | September 2, 2020
“Die Ökonomin Isabella Weber von der Universität Massachusetts Amherst betont im Gespräch die «dreifache Herausforderung» für die chinesische Regierung: «Verschuldungsdynamik, Abhängigkeit von Importen und Exporten sowie makroökonomischer Einbruch nach der Pandemie», eine Situation, die ihrer Einschätzung nach deutlich «komplexer» ist als diejenige ab 2007.”