This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history: the decade of the 1980s, when a fierce debate between “package reformers” supporting sweeping price liberalization and gradualists who argued that state participation in the market was critical to dampen inflation and maintain social stability. And it sheds light on the run-up to the student-led demonstrations of 1989.
12:20: Debunking a conventional wisdom on China’s economy
22:05: The relationship between states and markets
40:01: A universal need for reform in the early 1980s
1:10:47: Student intellectuals in 1988 and the “full steam ahead” camp
Recommendations:
Isabella: The movie Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa and Cold War, directed by Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski.
Kaiser: Assigned reading from Kaiser: The Chinese Communist Party: A Chinese Century in Ten Lives, edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van de Wen.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Introducing the Middle Earth podcast
China’s ethnic policy in Xinjiang and Tibet: The move toward assimilation
Live from the US-China Business Council: The bilateral trade relationship in 2019
Mexican and Canadian diplomats in a changing, challenging China
The U.S. and China: Cold war, or hot air?
Gene-edited babies, CRISPR, and China’s changing ethical landscape
Huawei and the tech cold war
Meng Wanzhou’s arrest: The legal dimension
40 years of reform and opening up, with Jude Blanchette
Blaming China
The Nature Conservancy in China
‘Shaken Authority’: Party-speak, propaganda, and the Sichuan earthquake of 2008
Mythbusting China’s social credit system
Shadow banking, P2P lending, and pyramid schemes: Lucy Hornby on China's gray economy
Introducing the Ta for Ta Podcast
Kevin Rudd on Xi Jinping’s worldview
Danny Russel on the rebalancing and decoupling
Kai-Fu Lee and the U.S.-China AI rivalry
Nury Turkel and the Uyghur plight
Introducing the ChinaEconTalk podcast
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free