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WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER 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 Committee Acclaimed 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 answers: "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 assumptions: 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 improvisation"—top-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 have"—harnessing 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.
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Keywords
- Adaptive Systems
- ancient China
- Asian history
- Bottom-up reform
- China
- China's economic development
- China’s rise
- Chinese bureaucracy
- Chinese economic policy
- Chinese history
- Communist party
- complex systems
- Confucius
- Cultural revolution
- Deng Xiaoping
- Development economics
- development strategy
- Directed improvisation
- Economic conditions in china
- Economic development in china
- Economic history
- economic sociology
- economic transformation
- Economics
- Emerging Markets
- Far East
- Global development
- Governance innovation
- Growth and institutions
- History of chinese economy
- institutional change
- Institutional economics
- market creation
- Modernization theory
- Policy adaptation
- Political Economy
- poverty trap
- State-led capitalism
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JP Politics and government
- thema EDItEUR::K Economics, Finance, Business and Management::KC Economics::KCM Development economics and emerging economies
- thema EDItEUR::K Economics, Finance, Business and Management::KC Economics::KCP Political economy
- thema EDItEUR::K Economics, Finance, Business and Management::KC Economics::KCZ Economic history
- thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHF Asian history
- Yuen Yuen Ang
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