How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (okładka  miękka, wyd. 03.2022)

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.