"To the by-now standard insights that China's economic reform has succeeded by its decentralized and gradualist approach, Hongyi Lai adds the crucial insight that Chinese leaders chose carefully, and by criteria we can now identify, where to initiate reforms. Not all coastal provinces were first encouraged to experiment with reforms, nor were all sectors involved. By identifying and explaining how Deng and his associates chose their targets and sustained a reform-tolerating coalition at the top, Lai adds immeasurably to comparativists' understanding of just how the 'Chinese miracle' was crafted. To all students who pursue the pressing moral question of how countries can be lifted rapidly out of poverty, Lai offers compelling and important
new answers.Lai's detailed, in-depth and utterly convincing analysis of this crucial case supplies the crucial complement to the great debates and theories of scholars like Easterly, Sachs, and Stiglitz."
- Ronald Rogowski, Interim Vice Provost, Director of the Center for International Relations, Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles"How did China's political leaders manage to introduce and sustain market reforms and opening? This study helps answer this important question by exploring the interconnections between economics and politics. It is a valuable contribution to the literature on China's reforms." - Susan L. Shirk, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Universityof California, San Diego"Hongyi Lai has produced a wonderful study of China's reform process, stressing the way in which leadership strategies and divisions shaped the growth of the economy. It was leadership, Lai argues, that led China out of the Maoist wilderness and into a period of sustained growth. Divisions within the leadership generated ups and downs in the course of reform, but ultimately it was Deng Xiaoping, who, in the course of adopting strategies to moderate this conflict, found a way to move forward incrementally, minimizing conservative opposition. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the political economy reform." - Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University
