Avoiding the Post-Communist Traps

Reviews of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China by Julian Gewirtz (Harvard University Press, 2017) and How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (Routledge, 2021) by Isabella M. Weber. Although each one is a work of independent scholarly research, there is a great deal of overlap between the two books, and this is why we have decided to review them together.

World-renowned Hungarian economist János Kornai has been apologising lately for having helped China become an economically robust, illiberal authoritarian superpower. He regrets having given advice to the Chinese leadership in the 1980s, without foresight as to the kind of threat China would pose in the coming decades to the Western liberal world.

In fact, as these two books demonstrate, it is unnecessary for Kornai to have any regrets. The Chinese economic miracle has taken place largely by ignoring the advice he and fellow Eastern European academics have offered. And they have offered a lot. In fact, it turns out from the research carried out by Gewirtz and Weber that they played a central role in the Chinese economic debates of the eighties.

Investigating Voices

As it is well known, the story begins with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. It marked the end of an era, and allowed the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, to announce his policies of ‘reform and opening’, similar to Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost and perestroika’, terms that are more familiar to Central and Eastern European readers.