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HOW CHINA ESCAPED THE POVERTY TRAP. Cornell Studies in Political Economy. By Yuen Yuen Ang. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. xvi, 326pp. (Illustrations.) US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-0020-0.
The story of China's economic transformation is still baffling to many. How did a once poor country transform itself into a middle-income, capitalist dynamo in such a short period of time, while other countries have failed in that quest? When countless poverty alleviation programs and billions of dollars of aid have only produced mixed results in addressing global poverty, the Chinese success story presses us to question what we have done wrong and how we can learn from the Chinese experience. But developing a clear and coherent understanding of its messy, decades-long process of economic development can be a daunting task. Ang's book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap takes on that challenge and makes an admirable effort to present a big, common-sense picture. The strength of the book is that it rejects any particular narrow model of explanation and instead provides a powerful dynamic narrative.
Ang pursues an alternative paradigm based on complexity to present an evolutionary process of China's economic development, which she calls directed improvisation given the Party-state's high degree of influence (note, not control as she points out) (17, 49). She analyzes mutual feedback processes among various factors of development over time. As the focus of her analysis, she picks two institutions or domains of activities where the market intersects between bureaucracy and national development strategy. Then she identifies three key mechanisms of adaptation in China's...