Book Launch – Isabella Weber: How China Escaped Shock Therapy

Prof. Isabella Weber will launch her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, on 27 May at 2pm EDT with R Bin Wong, James K Galbraith and Branko Milanović. The event is hosted by the Department of Economics and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Registration is now open here.

The Book

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy, but the country’s swift ascent in recent decades was never a forgone conclusion. Reformers after Mao’s death in 1976 agreed that it was necessary for China to overhaul the economic system and move towards marketization, but struggled over the right approach. Isabella Weber’s new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy uncovers the fierce reform debate that shaped China’s path. Through extensive research, Weber provides an unprecedented look at the economics that facilitated the country’s rise without leading to wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism.

You can preorder the book here and get 30% discount by entering the discount code ADC21.

A podcast with Politics, Theory other on the book is available here. 

The Panel

Author:
Isabella Weber is an Assistant Professor of economics and the research leader for China at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachussets Amherst. 

Panelists:
James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and a professorship in government at The University of Texas at Austin. In the 1990s, he served as chief technical adviser to China’s State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform.

Branko Milanović is a Senior Scholar at the CUNY Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality and served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years.

R. Bin Wong is Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Distinguished Professor of History and the author of China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.

Host:
Zhongjin Li, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City and the co-director of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute, UMass Amherst.