Between the 1980s and the present day, China has experienced one of the most consequential economic transformations in world history. One-fifth of the Earth's population has left behind a life of scarcity and subsistence for one of abundance and material comfort, while their nation has emerged as a preeminent economic and political power. In a systematic historical and sociological analysis of this unique juncture, Wang Feng charts the origins, forces, and consequences of this meteoric rise in living standards. He shifts the focus away from institutions and policies to offer new perspectives based on consumption among poorer, rural populations as a driver of global economic change. But is this 'Age of Abundance' coming to an end? Anticipating potential headwinds, including an aging population, increasing inequality, and intensifying political control, Wang explores whether this preeminence could be coming to a close.

WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

The authors document how four forces--exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion--are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. "Abundance" establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.

The authors set out each of the scarcities that could limit China's power and stall its progress. Beyond scarcities of natural resources and public goods, they explore China's persistent poverties of individual freedoms, institutions, and ideological appeal--and the corrosive loss of values among a growing middle class shackled by a parochial and inflexible political system.

Two leading experts on China evaluate its rise throughout the past one hundred fifty years, sharing portraits of key intellectual and political leaders to explain how China transformed from a country under foreign assault to a world giant.

This book is unique in covering all important topics of the Chinese economy in depth but written in a language understandable to the layman and yet challenging to the expert. Beginning with entrepreneurship that propels the dynamic economic changes in China today, the book is organized into four broad parts to discuss China's economic development, to analyze significant economic issues, to recommend economic policies and to comment on the timely economic issues in the American economy for comparison.Unlike a textbook, the discussion is original and thought-provoking. It is written by a most distinguished economist who has studied the Chinese economy for thirty years, after making breathtaking contributions to the fields of econometrics, applied economics and dynamic economics and serving as a major adviser to the government of Taiwan during its period of rapid development in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last thirty years, the author has served as a major adviser to the government of China on economic reform and important economic policies and cooperated with the Ministry of Education to introduce and promote the development of modern economics in China, including training hundreds of economists in China and placing many graduate students to pursue a doctoral degrees in economics in leading universities in the US and Canada. These graduates now plays pivotal roles in China and in the US in academics, business or government institutions. The essays, a culmination of the author's expertise in China over five decades, are being widely read in China. When the author became professor emeritus at Princeton, the University named the Econometric Research Program as the Gregory C Chow Econometric Research Program in his honor.

What is it like to be a Westerner teaching political philosophy in an officially Marxist state? Why do Chinese sex workers sing karaoke with their customers? And why do some Communist Party cadres get promoted if they care for their elderly parents? In this entertaining and illuminating book, one of the few Westerners to teach at a Chinese university draws on his personal experiences to paint an unexpected portrait of a society undergoing faster and more sweeping changes than anywhere else on earth. With a storyteller's eye for detail, Daniel Bell observes the rituals, routines, and tensions of daily life in China. China's New Confucianism makes the case that as the nation retreats from communism, it is embracing a new Confucianism that offers a compelling alternative to Western liberalism. Bell provides an insider's account of Chinese culture and, along the way, debunks a variety of stereotypes. He presents the startling argument that Confucian social hierarchy can actually contribute to economic equality in China. He covers such diverse social topics as sex, sports, and the treatment of domestic workers. He considers the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, wondering whether Chinese overcompetitiveness might be tempered by Confucian civility. And he looks at education in China, showing the ways Confucianism impacts his role as a political theorist and teacher. By examining the challenges that arise as China adapts ancient values to contemporary society, China's New Confucianism enriches the dialogue of possibilities available to this rapidly evolving nation. In a new preface, Bell discusses the challenges of promoting Confucianism in China and the West.

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.

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history. Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn—not only about their leaders, but also about their own people—stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.

What will happen when China can make nearly everything the U.S. and Europe can make--at one-third the cost? Fishman delves into dangerous question that not everyone wants answered.