How China became a market economy--Review of Julian Gewirtz’s “Unlikely Partners”

A view of the development of market socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Julian Gewirtrz’s “Unlikely Partners” charts, with an extraordinary attention to detail, these world-historic decisions and focuses on the role that foreign economists played in these early stages of China’s transformation. But while the declared focus of the book is on the foreign-to-Chinese interaction and cooperation, with the high point (extremely well described) being a week-long cruise-seminar in August 1985 along the Yangtze river on a luxury boat with about a hundred Chinese and foreign economists participating, among whom the most important for Chinese later reforms proved to be Janos Kornai, Wlodimierz Brus and James Tobin, the book is more than that. It documents almost 15 years (from Mao’s death to 1992) of discussions and policy decisions about the “goal model” of Chinese economy: relations between the government and enterprises, role of the plan and the market, ownership structure, macroeconomic policies and the like. Practically, the entire “new” Chinese economy, from the Central Bank to the Special Economic Zones to state conglomerates was “invented” then.

It is thus an indisputably necessary book for anyone who wants to learn more about China and about that extraordinary period of intellectual ferment....

Global Inequality
How China became a market economy--Review of Julian Gewirtz’s “Unlikely Partners”
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View