This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The authors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectoral development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt. The volume chronicles many shortcomings, but concludes that China's economic expansion is likely to continue during the coming decades.

Commercialization has been determined to be the source of increasing agricultural productivity and of higher rural incomes. This book reinterprets the impact of accelerated commercialization of Chinese agriculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the growth of the rural economy of Central and Eastern China. The author demonstrates that the prices of domestic agricultural products rose as China's agricultural markets became integrated with the international economy. These higher prices, in combination with increasing domestic demand and fueled by the growth of the urban sector, provided the incentive for increased rural household production that led to increased specialization in rural production. He estimates that between the 1890s and the 1930s, agricultural output rose at an annual rate roughly twice that of estimated population growth. While redressing the historical assessments of the pre-1949 economy, this book offers rich perspective on the enormous costs that enforced self-sufficiency and the restrictive commercial policies of the People's Republic inflicted on the rural sector between the 1950s and the late 1970s.

The author attempts to provide a reinterpretation of the impact that the accelerated commercialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had on growth and income distribution in the rural economy of central and eastern China. In this work it is demonstrated that the prices of domestic agricultural products rose as China's agricultural markets became integrated with the international economy. These higher prices, in combination with increasing domestic demand, fuelled by the growth of the urban sector, provided the incentive for increased rural household production, which led to increased specialization in rural production.

This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The authors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectoral development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt. The volume chronicles many shortcomings, but concludes that China's economic expansion is likely to continue during the coming decades.