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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Kean Fan Lim
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© The Author(s) 2023.This paper offers a critical engagement with Isabella Weber’s fascinating new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It foregrounds the book’s contributions to knowledge on a hitherto under-explored topic – why shock therapy advocates were unsuccessful in launching all-out price liberalisation across China during the 1980s – and introduces new questions through assessing Weber’s analysis vis-à-vis three geographical aspects of Chinese political-economic evolution: (a) the role of landownership control and redistribution in stabilising the Chinese economy following the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) revolutionary victory in 1949; (b) the path-dependent effects of Mao-era (1949-1976) landownership institutions on economic reforms during the 1980s; and (c) Deng Xiaoping’s approach to the multi-dimensional emergence of coastal-oriented industrialisation. These three aspects collectively accentuate how the territorial configuration and regulation of the Chinese political economy, so fundamental for producing and sustaining CPC regime durability, undermined the neoclassical bias towards price liberalisation. Understanding the geographical preconditions that underpin post-1949 Chinese political-economic evolution is therefore crucial for understanding why shock therapy was ultimately deemed incongruent with CPC rule.
Author(s): Lim KF
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environment and Planning A
Year: 2023
Volume: 55
Issue: 7
Pages: 1809 - 1815
Online publication date: 31/10/2023
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
ISSN (print): 0308-518X
ISSN (electronic): 1472-3409
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231202910
DOI: 10.1177/0308518X231202910
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