Assessing prospects as China's reform enters middle age. In 1978, China's Deng Xiaoping launched the economic reforms that have resulted in one of history's most dramatic and profound national transformations. The reforms, which have evolved and expanded during the ensuing four decades, removed institutional and policy obstacles to economic growth, tapped China's immense reserves of labor and entrepreneurial talent, and opened the country to foreign capital and investment. China has developed a more high-tech and service-based economy currently the world's second-largest and it now sends companies and capital abroad in keeping with its new status as a leading force in international trade and investment. But China also faces daunting challenges in sustaining growth, continuing the unfinished agenda of economic transformation, addressing the adverse consequences of economic success, and dealing with mounting pressure and suspicion from the United States and other long-standing trade and investment partners. China also confronts uncertainties and risks stemming from the project to expand its influence across the globe, the so-called Belt and Road Initiative. In all these matters, China's current leader, Xi Jinping, seems determined to make his own lasting mark on the country and on the country's effort to become a leading global power. In this book, leading experts offer insights into the many difficult issues China now faces, including development of its rural economy, urban industrial policy, public finance, and international trade and investment. The authors drawing on perspectives from economics, political science, and policy analysis provide historical context, drawing lessons from four decades of reform in China, and they analyze the difficulties for China's economy as the reform era moves into its fifth decade. Readers looking for a comprehensive assessment of where China's economy stands today, and its future prospects will find it in this book.
Jacques deLisle is Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Avery Goldstein is David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations, Director of Center for the Study of Contemporary China, and Associate Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Introduction China's Economic Reform and Opening at Forty: Past Accomplishments and Emerging Challenges Part I: Enlivening the Domestic Economy 1. China's Domestic Economy: From "Enlivening" to "Steerage" 2. Reflections on Forty Years of Rural Reform 3. Varieties of Capitalism in China: Private-Sector Development During the Xi Jinping Era 4. Financial Repression Still: Policy Concerns and Stagnation in China's Corporate Bond Market Part II: Opening to the Outside 5. Four Decades of Reforming China's International Economic Role 6. China's Emergence as a Trading Power and Tensions with the West 7. Regulating China's Inward FDI: Changes, Challenges, and the Future 8. Great Leap Outward: Chinese ODI and the Belt and Road Initiative Acknowledgments Contributors Index
This volume raises new and very important themes in the study of China's economy. The contributors and editors are an all-star lineup of scholars who provide a long-term perspective on the reforms that explain how China got to where it is economically and shed light on the country's current strengths and weaknesses. There is a dearth of good writing that covers the entire arc of China's economic reform over the past 40 years, and this volume is an antidote. It will serve as a standard reference for policymakers, scholars, and students."- Margaret Pearson, Harrison Distinguished Professor, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
