Presents a story of two Chinas - an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marks its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.

Table of Contents

1. Just how capitalist is China?; 2. The entrepreneurial decade; 3. A great reversal; 4. What is wrong with Shanghai?; 5. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

Author Biography

Yasheng Huang teaches international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His previous appointments include serving as assistant professor at the University of Michigan, associate professor at Harvard Business School, and consultant to the World Bank. In addition to journal articles, Professor Huang has published Inflation and Investment Controls in China (Cambridge University Press, 1996), FDI in China (1998), and Selling China (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Selling China examined the institutional drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and was profiled in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Economist, Businessworld, Le Monde, Economic Times, and Liangwang (Outlook in China). His research on FDI was cited in a number of major government reports on FDI policies and regulations. In collaborative projects with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on engineering education and human capital formation in China and India and on entrepreneurship. Professor Huang is the recipient of the Social Science-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Fellowship.