TV, Radio and Podcasts

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 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)”

 
 

‘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.”