Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State
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.Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Review
'The development of the Chinese private sector is a key to the future shape and performance of the Chinese economy. At present, the subject is widely misunderstood. This book does more than any other to clarify the issues and point the way forward.' Christopher Howe, FBA, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield '... important book ... If one wants to understand the policy origins of China's growing divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, one need look no further than this book.' William Kirby, Harvard University 'Sure to generate a lively debate, Professor Huang's study provides a provocative and well-researched challenge to much current thinking on China's economic development.' Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale Law School '... Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics is both immensely informative and enormously provocative.' Charles Wolf, Jr., Pardee RAND Graduate School
Review
"The development of the Chinese private sector is a key to the future shape and performance of the Chinese economy. At present, the subject is widely misunderstood. This book does more than any other to clarify the issues and point the way forward." - Christopher Howe, FBA, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield
"Yasheng Huang is an insightful scholar of China's political economy. In this important book, he shows how China's rural economy took off in the 1980s, led by 'township and village enterprises' that were essentially private, only to be ignored in the 1990s by state-led development that focused on urban regions such as Shanghai. The 'Shanghai miracle,' he argues - and as any businessman who has worked there knows - was not the simple triumph of capitalism, but of a stronger and more intrusive (and effective) state. If one wants to understand the policy origins of China's growing divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, one need look no further than this book." - William Kirby, Harvard University
"Sure to generate a lively debate, Professor Huang's study provides a provocative and well-researched challenge to much current thinking on China's economic development. The widely shared gains of the 1980s have not been matched in more recent years. Danger signs include the stagnation in household incomes, growing inequality and illiteracy, and heightened governance problems. Huang argues that China will not be able to continue to grow unless the benefits of growth are widely shared through fundamental political and legal reforms." - Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale Law School
"Most books about China's economy and their authors fall into one of two camps: those that are hypercritical and those that are hyperlaudatory. Professor Huang's book is closer to the former than the latter, for example, he characterizes China's economy as '...crony capitalism built on systemic corruption and raw political power.' Yet, his book is different from, as well as better than, others in that genre because it gives ample recognition to contrary views and empirical data supporting them. Consequently, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics is both immensely informative and enormously provocative." - Charles Wolf, Jr., Pardee RAND Graduate School
"For years, Western economists are amazed that China's growth is obviously fueled by factor accumulation and yet her capital markets appear to be under developed. Yasheng Huang's book provides some refreshing information and analysis. He shows that in China's vast rural areas, which Western academics often cannot obtain good and detailed information, economic and financial liberalization went much further than credited by outside analysts and that the rigorous development of private entrepreneurship explained much of China's takeoff. His thesis is worthy of attention; this book will enhance our understanding of China's economy and lead us to take a more thorough look at the development process." - Bernard Yeung, University of Singapore Business School
"Original research on China is rare, largely because statistics, though plentiful, are notoriously unreliable. Mr Huang has gone far beyond the superficial data on gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment that satisfy most researchers. Instead, he has unearthed thousands of long-forgotten pages of memoranda and policy documents issued by bank chairmen, businessmen and state officials. In the process he has discovered two Chinas: one, from not so long ago, vibrant, entrepreneurial and rural; the other, today's China, urban and controlled by the state." - The Economist
"Written before the full force of the crisis became apparent, Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State presciently anticipates the need for a guide to the least understood weaknesses in China's economy.... As a look at China's entrepreneurial economy in the 1980s and 1990s - and as a counterpoint to the misconception that China is steadily evolving into a more market-oriented economy - this book is unparalleled." - Time
About the Author
Yasheng Huang teaches international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His previous appointments include serving as assistant professor at the University of Michigan, associate professor at Harvard Business School, and consultant to the World Bank. In addition to journal articles, Professor Huang has published Inflation and Investment Controls in China (Cambridge University Press, 1996), FDI in China (1998), and Selling China (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Selling China examined the institutional drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and was profiled in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Economist, Businessworld, Le Monde, Economic Times, and Liangwang (Outlook in China). His research on FDI was cited in a number of major government reports on FDI policies and regulations. In collaborative projects with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on engineering education and human capital formation in China and India and on entrepreneurship. Professor Huang is the recipient of the Social Science-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Fellowship.
Customer Reviews
Lack of balance
After reading this book, you can almost feel that there is some kind of idealistic political-eoconomic model in the author's mind, and that such model exists in reality and works great. Unfortunately, a model of that nature broke 80 years ago and broke again in 2008. Many social scientists tend to be too optimistic on how human nature can turn positive under some political procedural logic, and tend to ignore that crony Capitalism is indeed everywhere and that every economy is, unavoidably, moving along with some type of sickness. This could seriously lead to an insensitivity to some fundamental institutional changes happening in China beginning from 2002. In the end, hypercritical is as quixotic as hyperlaudatory.
Radically new view of the recent Chinese Economy
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
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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