How China escaped shock therapy: Isabella Weber unpacks the debates of the 1980s

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2021

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history: the decade of the 1980s, when a fierce debate between “package reformers” supporting sweeping price liberalization and gradualists who argued that state participation in the market was critical to dampen inflation and maintain social stability. And it sheds light on the run-up to the student-led demonstrations of 1989.

12:20: Debunking a conventional wisdom on China’s economy

22:05: The relationship between states and markets

40:01: A universal need for reform in the early 1980s

1:10:47: Student intellectuals in 1988 and the “full steam ahead” camp

Recommendations:

Isabella: The movie Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa and Cold War, directed by Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski.

Kaiser: Assigned reading from Kaiser: The Chinese Communist Party: A Chinese Century in Ten Lives, edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van de Wen.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:45.7	That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SUPChina.
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1:10.5	Or check out all the original writing on China from hundreds of different news sources.
1:14.8	Or check out all the original writing on our site at suppChina.com,
1:18.5	including our reported stories, editorials, and regular columns,
1:22.1	as well as a growing library of videos and, of course, podcasts.
1:26.4	We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs,
1:28.0	from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim people in China's Xinjiang region, to China's ambitious efforts to
1:32.7	eliminate poverty. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is
1:38.9	reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I am Kaiser Guo coming to today from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1:47.7	Today I am delighted to be speaking with Isabella Weber,
1:50.8	this assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
	...

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