Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

Now available in a fully-revised and updated third edition, this established textbook provides a penetrating and comprehensive analysis of the historical, institutional, and theoretical factors that have contributed to China’s economic success. Includes coverage of China’s foreign investments, trade with regional partners, Chinese human capital, and bureaucratic economic institutions Covers a diverse set of important issues, including environmental restraints, income distribution, rural poverty, the education system, healthcare, exchange rate policies, monetary policies, and financial regulation Accessibly written and intelligently organized to offer a straightforward guide to China’s economic evolution Written by a lauded economist, researcher, and advisor to government officials in mainland China and Taiwan

This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

The book provides insights into the economic and social transformation that China has undergone from 1979 to the present. Based on the author’s research in China for over three decades, China’s Transformation: The Success Story and the Success Trap shows how its ‘reform and open door’ policy evolved and helped achieve tremendous economic success. However, it also generated serious social and environmental problems. The book presents that the consequences of this success story of growth are so strong that it has been difficult for China to change its main development path to achieve a desirable level of equity and sustainability. The author describes this as the ‘success trap’ that China is currently grappling with. The author argues that China’s reform path is grounded in the premises of the European Industrial Revolution backed by strong sociopolitical forces at home, indicating that a major change in the development path is unlikely. However, all indications point to a strong and prosperous China as a rising world power in the coming decades, trying to cope with the sociopolitical problems in its own way.

Decades ago, there was no distinct middle class in the People's Republic of China. Any meaningful discussion of China's economy, politics, or society must take into account the rapid emergence and explosive growth of the Chinese middle class. This book details the origins and characteristics of this dramatic change.

China's Banking Transformation describes the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese banking system based on the author's 12 years serving on two Chinese bank boards. Acknowledging the challenges banks face, the book challenges conventional views, maintaining that China's banks now function well within China's market socialist political economy, and within China's traditional collectivist cultural world.

As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present. China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion. The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

Featured as Book of the Week by The Wire China in August 2020! If your business has anything to do with China or you simply seek to understand the rise of China, you need to read this book. In The China Paradox, business strategist and historian Dr. Paul G. Clifford uses vivid examples from his deep experience in China to lay bare the delicate and fragile balance of forces which lie at the heart of China’s success. He explains how, against all the odds, the ruling Communist Party boldly led the economic reforms as the surest way to preserve their grip on power. This flourishing of China’s hybrid developmental model is placed firmly in the historical context, shedding light on the legacies that thwarted earlier attempts at change and which today still threaten to render the progress unsustainable. China is taking its place on the world economic stage, displaying business acumen and innovation. But China’s un-reformed political governance, coupled with the challenges resulting from breakneck growth, may hamper the nation’s ability to realize its potential and impact its longer-term prospects. This book is for anyone who needs to understand how China competes, anyone with business or other affairs in China, and anyone involved in foreign trade will benefit from this book. Click to read the author's article on Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/the-us-should-not-demonize-huawei-it-should-invest-to-compete/ Click here to see a related article in the South China Morning Post: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2134180/reform-or-no-reform-authors-clash-over-chinas-way

This volume explains China's economic rise and liberalization and assesses how this growth is reshaping the structure and dynamics of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. China has historically been the center of Asian trade, economic, and financial networks, and its global influence continues to expand in the twenty-first century. In exploring the causes for and effects of China's re surging power, this volume takes a broad, long-term view that reaches well beyond economics for answers. Contributors explore the vast web of complex issues raised by China's ascendancy. The first three chapters discuss the global and historical origins of China's shift to a market economy and that transformation's impact on the international market system. Subsequent essays explore the ability of large Chinese manufacturers to counter the might of transnational retailers, the effect of China's rise on world income distribution and labor, and the consequences of a stronger China for its two most powerful neighbors, Russia and Japan. The concluding chapter questions whether China's growth is sustainable and if it will ultimately shift the center of global capitalism from the West to the East.

In modern history, China has been primarily a land power, dominating smaller states along its massive continental flanks. But China’s turn toward the sea is now very much a reality, as evident in its stunning rise in global shipbuilding markets, its vast and expanding merchant marine, the wide offshore reach of its energy and minerals exploration companies, its growing fishing fleet, and indeed its increasingly modern navy. Yet, for all these achievements, there is still profound skepticism regarding China’s potential as a genuine maritime power. Beijing must still import the most vital subcomponents for its shipyards, maritime governance remains severely bureaucratically challenged, and the navy evinces, at least as of yet, little enthusiasm for significant blue water power projection capabilities. This volume provides a truly comprehensive assessment of prospects for China’s maritime development by situating these important geostrategic phenomena within a larger world historical context. China is hardly the only land power in history to attempt transformation by fostering sea power. Many continental powers have elected or been impelled to transform themselves into significant maritime powers in order to safeguard their strategic position or advance their interests. We examine cases of attempted transformation from the Persian Empire to the Soviet Union, and determine the reasons for their success or failure. Too many works on China view the nation in isolation. Of course, China’s history and culture are to some extent exceptional, but building intellectual fences actually hinders the effort to understand China’s current development trajectory. Without underestimating the enduring pull of China’s past as it relates to threats to the country’s internal stability and its landward borders, this comparative study provides reason to believe that China has turned the corner on a genuine maritime transformation. If that proves indeed to be the case, it would be a remarkable if not singular event in the history of the last two millennia.