num_pages: 344
description: WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZEBEST OF BOOKS IN 2017 BY FOREIGN AFFAIRSWINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences. Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize CommitteeAcclaimed as game changing and field shifting How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise.How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three stimulate growth first build good institutions first or some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth.Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying linear causation a mechanistic worldview and historical determinism. Instead she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control but directed improvisationtop-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials.Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second the first step out of the poverty trap is to use what you haveharnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets even if that means defying first-world norms.Bold and meticulously researched How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars practitioners and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.
language: English
title: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap
publisher: Cornell University Press