How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate
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. Isabella Weber’s 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interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization.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.
Date: 15 June 2021, 17:00 (Tuesday, 8th week, Trinity 2021)
Venue: Online
Speaker: Professor Isabella Weber (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Organising department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser: Dr Jerome Doyon (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host: Dr Jerome Doyon (University of Oxford)
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=G96VzPWXk0-0uv5ouFLPkXpePWtgPbxBg3az3qj5undUMU1FRklaVFhRQUpDME1UREMyUkxGUUNMOC4u
Audience: Public
Editor: Clare Orchard