Sources of Chinese Economic Growth 1978-1996

A relatively non-technical overview of how and why the Chinese economy grew after 1978, this text argues that the Chinese government played a very positive role in the process. Foreign trade and foreign investment were less important than usually thought. It concludes that China benefited from some of the policies adopted by Mao in the 60s and 70s.
This analysis of the political economy of growth in the era of Deng Xiaoping takes issue with the growth-accounting methodologies and market-centred explanations which characterize so much of the literature on transition-era China. By adopting an approach which echoes the pioneering work of Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, and Robert Wade on other East Asian economies, and which makes full use of the statistical materials that have become available since 1978, this book shows that Chinese growth was driven by a combination of state-led industrial policy and the favourable infrastructural legacies of the Maoist era. And in giving due weight to the sheer complexity of the growth process by looking in detail at the experience of four very different Chinese regions, it avoids over-simplistic macroeconomic generalization. Nevertheless, even this type of approach is inadequate, because it fails to explain why industrial policy has been so much more successful in China than in other countries.