Endorsements & Awards
“One of the most consequential economic debates in China over the direction of reform took place in the 1980s and focused on how markets should be created. The outcome of that debate set the pattern for much of China’s subsequent economic reforms. Isabella Weber, drawing on interviews of the participants and others together with many new sources of unpublished and published information, does a masterful job of explaining how this debate evolved and its ultimate impact.”
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DWIGHT H. PERKINS
Harvard University
“This superb book presents the most compelling interpretation I have read of the sources of Chinese gradualism and its success in fostering economic growth and transformation while preserving enough social cohesion to hold the Chinese society together. It is the product of an independent, inquisitive, open mind—the only type that can hope to grasp the phenomenon that is modern China. It is also the work of a first-rate economist, in the best sense of that term.”
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JAMES K. GALBRAITH
The University of Texas at Austin
“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.”
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BRANKO MILANOVIC
LSE and CUNY
“China’s debates in the 1980s about reform of the non-market economy are centrally important to understanding global political economy in the 21st century. The resolution of the debates about the ‘Big Bang’ set China on the course of pragmatic system reform (‘groping for stones to cross the river’) that has remained in place ever since. Isabella M. Weber’s study is unique. It uses information not only from a wide array of written documents but also from extensive interviews with participants in the debates. Her remarkable book provides a rich, balanced and scholarly analysis which illuminates the complex reality of this critically important period in modern world history.”
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PETER NOLAN
University of Cambridge
“Isabella M. Weber succeeds in offering a powerful account of China’s reform-era market creation that is of acute interest to economists and historians alike. Her book is a call to economists to ponder the relevance of political economy with its European roots in classical economics of the early modern era and with Chinese roots in a period almost two millennia earlier.”
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R. BIN WONG
UCLA
“China’s advance has been the transformative economic story of the past four decades. But why did China adopt its incremental strategy of “reform and opening up”? The German-born Weber, now at Amherst, provides a well-researched answer: the Chinese state “uses the market as a tool in the pursuit of its larger development goals”. Above all, by eschewing “shock therapy”, it sought to protect “the economy’s commanding heights” from destabilising change.”
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MARTIN WOLF
Financial Times
“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.”
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REBECCA KARL
London Review of Books
“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.”
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ADAM TOOZE
Chartbook and Noema
“The book is an absolute must read for anyone interested in China and the ideas behind its evolution.”
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MARIANA MAZZUCATO
UCL
“This book is a must read for anybody interested in the history of China’s economic reforms, and I warmly recommend it. It is a highly readable and extremely valuable contribution to the debate on China’s early reform efforts in the 1980s. The book’s most valuable contribution draws from Weber’s extensive interviews with the reformers.”
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BERT HOFMAN
Former World Bank Country Director for China, Mongolia and Korea
“What Weber discovered is fascinating, and really a reflection of what China has become: a complex blend of market and state forces that have helped create a unique economic model, fueled by private enterprise, state subsidies and government controls. Weber paints a compelling portrait of the debates that took place in the 1980s as well as the people involved.”
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DAVID BARBOZA
Pulitzer Prize Winner
“How China Escaped Shock Therapy constitutes an impressive work of intellectual history. Weber presents an exceedingly thorough, nuanced and even exciting account of the debate, which was fluid and constantly changing.”
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CARL RISKIN
China Quarterly
“This tension between China’s rise and its only ‘partial assimilation’ defines our present moment, she writes. The purpose of How China Escaped Shock Therapy is to explain this divergence, which Weber does very well.”
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JOEL ANDREAS
New Left Review
“Weber’s book is well researched, based on Chinese language documents and dozens of interviews with key thinkers and actors in its economic reforms, and is informative and stimulating. It’s an important book that deserves a wide readership. It offers a sober analysis of the intellectual and political struggles – that occurred on an international scale – that transformed China, and are having global repercussions. It provides key insights into ‘how China works’ and subtly demonstrates that neoliberalism is not the only game in town. It is one of the most thought-provoking and illuminating books I have read.”
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INDERJEET PARMAR City, University of London
“Isabella Weber’s meticulously researched monograph tells the story of China’s fortunate break with the international economic policy mainstream, which allowed the country to escape Russia’s dismal fate. Isabella Weber’s extraordinarily detailed analysis of the economic policy debates around price reforms offers several lessons for today. Shock therapy has changed but market-fundamentalism is still on the agenda. The combination of historical depth with theoretical insights that also speak to contemporary debates makes How China Escaped Shock Therapy a benchmark monograph in the literature on the political economy of China and shock therapy.”