| Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State | 
 enlarge | Author: Yasheng Huang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 11332
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 366
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0521898102
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.1220951
EAN: 9780521898102
ASIN: 0521898102
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This book presents a story of two Chinas - an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand, and the result was rapid as well as broad-based growth. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its productive rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. The single biggest obstacle to sustainable growth and financial stability in China today is its poor political governance. As the country marks its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.
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| Customer Reviews:
Radically new view of the recent Chinese Economy December 10, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of those books that very significantly change how we see a very important part of the world. The above reader review and the professional book reviews capture the book's strengths very well. I don't have the necessary expertise to question the author's interpretations, but they have immense credibility in their basis in detailed exploration of Chinese archives. For an historian a compelling use of documents to create a fundamentally new paradigm of recent Chinese economic history.
My only real complaint is with the editing: too often the same phrases are used to repeat the same message or qualification of the message. It becomes a little like a hypnotic poem: it makes sure we get the message, and given its novelty perhaps this is acceptable. I think that if the analysis of this book is accurate, then we can expect very significant disorder in China with the unfolding of the global credit crisis. And in a funny sort of way it will all be the result of the American and Chinese varieties of crony Capitalism. In both cases one has some sympathy for entrepreneurs and ordinary working people caught in the webs constructed by economic and political elites more keen on building their own enormous wealth than on the wider economy. The triumph of unenlightened self interest.
Indispensable for understanding China October 23, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Professor Huang has written a brilliant critique of China's economic development (and of necessity, debunks much of what others have written about China's economy). He shows that China's development started in the 1980's with government programs focused on the rural economy, with programs designed to encourage rural entrepreneurs. Unfortunately with the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the new government leaders (technocrats from Shanghai) focused on major programs for urban areas, including massive construction projects and encouragement of foreign investment. Rural enterprises (and their required informal and official funding networks) were shut down. Although there was a proliferation of highrise buildings and massive construction projects (Three Gorges Dam, Shanghai's maglev, the Olympics,...) the result was slower income growth (especially in the rural areas), increasing illiteracy (parents could not afford to pay rapidly increasing tuitions), declining health care (hospitals, like schools, also became profit centers for local bureaucrats), expropriation of farmers' land, and much much more corruption, all of which has led to increasing social disorder among peasants who are finding themselves worse off. Party cadres' pay has rapidly increased and there are now far more of them. And productivity growth has declined or has even straight-lined. A return to the policies of the 1980's is clearly in order, but the current leaders, while trying to fix things, are still relying on top down commands and controls, and they have a much larger bureaucracy to keep happy.
Anyone trying to understand China's economic development over the last thirty years must read this. The causes of China's growth are badly misunderstand; too many economists and analysts have been overwhelmed by the vision of Shanghai's massive development without understanding the tremendous cost and waste involved, and the penalties paid by the common people (income for the poorest Shanghaiese has actually been going down).
The book should also be a lesson for Western politicians who think that China's methods of centralized planning and control of industrial policy can be applied in the West. Or maybe our politicians also understand how government control can lead to huge payoffs for politicians (as with Countrywide Credit's payoffs of at least two senators and lots of others politically connected, not to mention the huge salaries paid to Democrat politicians 'working' at Fannie Mae).
Read this book if you have any interest in China or economic development!
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