Statism with Chinese Characteristics offers a fresh perspective on the Chinese economy and its impact on the world. By diving into details and data such as the private nature of rural enterprises, early financial reforms, and the critical role of initial political openness, Yasheng Huang challenges the popular view that credits China's success to a unique blend of government interventions and autocratic governance. Huang shows how China's growth was driven by private entrepreneurship and gradual liberalization, not by infrastructural development, statist finance, and meritocratic autocracy. He confronts assumptions regarding the conventional wisdom about the Chinese economy, explicitly engaging with the policy pivot from the 1980s to the 1990s and infrastructure as a crucial factor behind China's growth. Underscoring the significant role of politics in shaping economic outcomes, this second edition explores the challenges facing the Chinese economy today, emphasizing how political changes dictate economic reforms, rather than the opposite.

‘Huang powerfully argues that much of what we are told about Chinese economic growth is wrong. The origins of the tremendous success lie not in government-directed industrial investments, but in rural reforms. It wasn't top-down expert policymaking from the Chinese Communist Party, but bottom-up initiatives that elites allowed (or couldn't stop) that were most important. And the future isn't as bright as scores of China enthusiasts are claiming, despite huge investments in AI. This is a must-read book for everybody interested in China and the global economy, and it will be challenging to many.‘

Daron Acemuoglu - Institute Professor at MIT and the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Economics

‘Yasheng Huang reframes how we should think about China’s development, showing how political liberalization in the 1980s fostered a broader, more durable form of economic growth than the brittle statist and mercantilist system that has come to the fore in the last generation. His insights should inform how the world understands China’s political and economic system today.‘

Marcus Brauchli - managing partner of North Base Media and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal

‘Yasheng Huang combines micro financial data with macro political analysis to provide a refreshing perspective on what’s not miraculous about the Chinese economic miracle. The analysis of how increases in GDP do not equate to improvements in household income is alone worth the price of the book.‘

Richard Danzig - former Secretary of the US Navy

‘Most books on China fall into two camps, which either predict impending disaster in China or celebrate the success of the ‘China model.’ Yasheng Huang is a true scholar who takes a different path. He resists easy explanations, looks at China in all its complexity, and makes us think deeply about what has happened in China. Yasheng has long argued that one needs to look beyond the GDP numbers, and that the distributional effects of growth in China have been quite negative, and points to the distribution of power as the fundamental force behind this pattern of growth. In this book, he marshals evidence that not only have negative distributional effects of Chinese growth accelerated in the last decades, but that it is the fundamental force behind the growing reliance on external markets that are at the root of the trade war with the US right now.‘

Chang-Tai Hsieh - Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago

‘How is it possible that China has broken all economic growth records yet still remains a source of low-cost labor for global supply chains? Why haven’t massive national productivity gains been reflected fully in higher wages, in the way seen in Japan, Singapore, or South Korea? Yasheng Huang takes you deep inside the Chinese reform process with a comprehensive look at data, history, and politics. To understand what really happened, how China has impacted the world, and what is likely to happen next, you need to read this compelling book.‘

Simon Johnson - Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Economics

‘After leading the debate on the dynamism of China’s market-driven economy in the early 2000s, Yasheng Huang now uncovers deep flaws in Beijing’s increasingly statist backtracking, and frames China’s profound growth challenge in a new and important light.‘

Stephen Roach - Yale University, former Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley, and the author of Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (2022)