How China Escaped Shock Therapy at London School of Economics

Isabella M. Weber gives lecture with host James Putzel and discussant Andrew Fischer

Isabella M. Weber was a guest speaker for an online lecture series where she presented her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

“When I started out doing this project it was really pretty erratic to be asking such a big question and to be pursuing such a historic, qualitative kind of work out of development economics. I just want to share this in the spirit of encouraging everybody to pursue the kind of questions that you really care about and that you really find important rather than necessarily narrowing yourself by thinking you can only ask questions that are a variety of a theme that you pick up from somewhere else where you just add a little footnote. Not to say that I have done more than adding a footnote but just encourage you to pursue to real questions that you care about.” — Isabella M. Weber

The lecture was hosted by the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice Series for 2021/22. The event was convened by Professor James Putzel who was joined by Professor Andrew Fischer as a discussant. After Weber’s presentation, Fischer opened a discussion followed by questions from the students.

How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021, the 2022 Best Book in Interdisciplinary Studies Award 2022 of the International Studies Association, and was selected by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, as one of his best mid-year reads. The book has also been reviewed in Boston Review, Dissent Magazine, The Nation, London Review of Books, Chartbook, and New Left Review.