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.

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