China has become deeply integrated into the world economy, but the country’s swift ascent in recent decades was never a forgone conclusion. Reformers after Mao’s death in 1976 agreed that it was necessary for China to move towards marketisation, but struggled over the right approach.
Isabella Weber’s new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy uncovers the fierce reform debate that shaped China’s path, offering a novel perspective on the origins of China’s distinctive economic model. Through extensive research, Weber provides an unprecedented look at the economics that facilitated the country’s rise without leading to wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism.
Join Isabella for an illuminating discussion and Q&A, co-hosted by Professor Wesley Widmaier, Head of the Department of International Relations from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific and Professor Xin Meng from the ANU Research School of Economics.
This event is free and open to public, and is jointly organised by the ANU College of Law, the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, and the ANU College of Business and Economics.
About the author
Isabella M. Weber is a political economist working on China, global trade and the history of economic thought.
She is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021 and has been recommended by the Financial Times and Foreign Policy. For her work on the rise of economics in China’s recent history she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Previously she was a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.
About the co-hosts
Wesley Widmaier is Professor and Head of the Department of International Relations. His research addresses the interplay of wars, crises, and change – and the ways in which stability can cause instability, a concern that spans International Political Economy and International Security debates.
From the International Political Economy side, Widmaier’s work addresses the historical development of economic ideas, institutions, and interests, as the ‘lessons’ of past crises can be over-learned in ways that contribute to future crises. He has engaged these concerns across publications in leading journals including New Political Economy, International Studies Quarterly, Millennium, and Review of International Studies. Most recently, he has published a book-length study concerning these issues, Economic Ideas in Political Time: The Rise and Fall of Economic Orders from the Progressive Era to the Global Financial Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Widmaier is a past Section Chair of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association.
Xin Meng is Professor of Economics. Much of her research is centred on the Chinese economy and the history thereof. Her work has been supported by multiple funders including the Australian Research Council, AusAID, the Ford Foundation and World Bank. Xin’s work has been published in leading journals including Science, Review of Economic Studies, The Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Labour Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Labour Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Review of Income and Wealth, Journal of Comparative Economics and Journal of Population Economics.
This event will be recorded
The recording will be made publicly available after the event on the CBE webpage. Participants can ask questions or make comments via the chat function. If you do not wish your question or comment to be in the recording, please email events.cbe@anu.edu.au shortly after the event.