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How China Became Capitalist . Ronald Coase and Ning Wang . Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2012. xi + 256 pp. £60.00. ISBN 978-1-137-01936-3
Book Reviews
The legendary centenarian economist and Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase has, with Ning Wang, written a remarkably engaging and informative account of China's recent transition from being a political economy under Mao Zedong dominated by top-down state planning, towards the current state-of-affairs where markets, prices and private enterprise play a much greater role in economic allocation; a transition, according to the authors, from a socialist to a capitalist economy. This transition has been accompanied, as most global citizens are aware, by heroic rates of economic growth which have transformed China from an internationally isolated agrarian economy to become the second-largest global producer, the workshop of the world, in little more than a generation. Indeed, the speed of this transformation, as the book makes clear, has far exceeded even the most optimistic predictions of China's leaders and China watchers, allowing more people to climb out of poverty than at any other time in human history.
Coase and Wang tell a tale based on detailed research into the machinations of China's post-Mao leaders, explaining the ways in which institutional transformation was achieved not so much by bold policies from the centre but by what the authors call "marginal revolutions." These were decisive changes, often the result of pressure...