Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world's second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly. Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt.
By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions—features that defy norms of good governance—to build markets. Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur. Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation.
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today. Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases. Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps.
**
Review
WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE
"Yuen Yuen Ang offers a revisionist theoretical framework that grapples with complexities of institutional adaptation alongside detailed analyses of sub-national variation in development outcomes... her systematic engagement with diverse literatures circumvents disagreement over which came first, democracy or development, to make a field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes... Anyone concerned with institutions,development, or the role of China in the world, should read this elegantly written book."
-- Peter Katzenstein Book Prize Committee, for "best book in international relations,comparative politics, or political economy."
"The first takeaway of the book, that a poor country can harness the institutions they have and get development going is a liberating message... This provocative message challenges our prevailing practice of assessing a country's institutions by their distance from the global best practice... The second part of the book is equally thought provoking. While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation... this analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level."
--Yongmei Zhou (Director of the World Development Report 2017), World Bank Development Blog
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime... Her unconventional insight is that the first challenge of development is to harness 'weak/wrong/bad' institutions to create markets... China wanted to begin a process of "adaptation" and for that they needed to create conditions conducive to "directed improvisation."... Professor Ang is making important advances in understanding how development can be made possible in her approach to Complexity and Development 2.0.
-- Lant Pritchett (Harvard Kennedy School), State Capability Blog
"Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state--from the center to the periphery, across time and space--has actually practiced (not merely preached) innovation, problem solving, and effective implementation... Future studies of bureaucratic life in China and elsewhere must reckon seriously with Ang's account; she has set an admirably high bar and capably filled a conspicuous scholarly vacuum. It is encouraging that the development policy community is also taking note... Her book is compelling, important, and deserving of a wide audience."
-- Michael Woolcock (World Bank), Governance
This book is a triumph, opening a window onto the political economy of China’s astonishing rise that takes as its starting point systems and complexity. Its lessons apply far beyond China’s borders... Ang reveals… [a system of] ‘directed improvisation’- a ‘paradoxical mixture of top-down direction and bottom-up improvisation’… I love this phrase, and it could easily become as prevalent and useful as Peter Evans’ ‘embedded autonomy.’ -- Duncan Green (Oxfam), LSE Review of Books
As if explaining modern Chinese economic development was not enough of a challenge, Ang has two even loftier goals. The first is methodological. She expresses a frustration with political science’s causality obsession and modeling approaches that deliver isolated snapshots of complex processes… Ang’s second ambition is to apply this coevolutionary schema to how we understand economic development generally. -- Edmund Malesky (Duke University), Perspectives on Politics
More unusual are political economy studies that formulate an argument about a recent economic development experience and argue that the principles explaining it are the same as those found in prominent approaches to economic history, thereby proposing an interpretation of economic history scholarship in light of more contemporary developments. Yuen Yuen Ang achieves precisely this with her new interpretation of China’s economic development path. Her key conceptual innovation is to bring complexity theory into the study of economic growth. -- Bin Wong (UCLA, History), Journal of Economic History
I had also not imagined that China, and its remarkable economic growth over the past four decades, would provide such a rich example of complexity principles in action. -- Keith Johnston, Cultivating Leadership Blog (New Zealand)
NAMED "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS
China's transformation cannot be attributed to a single cause; rather, it arose from a contingent, interactive process—Ang calls it 'directed improvisation.' She formalizes this insight by using a novel analytic method that she terms 'coevolutionary narrative,' which has the potential to influence future studies of institutional and economic change beyond China.
-- Andrew J. Nathan (Columbia University), Foreign Affairs
About the Author
Yuen Yuen Ang is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining Michigan, she was Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
She is a winner of the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the GDN & Gates Foundation international essay prize on the Future of Development, the Eldersveld Prize for Outstanding Research (awarded by the University of Michigan), and two Early Career Fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies.
Description:
Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world's second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly. Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt. By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions—features that defy norms of good governance—to build markets. Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur. Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today. Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases. Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps. **
Review
WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE
"Yuen Yuen Ang offers a revisionist theoretical framework that grapples with complexities of institutional adaptation alongside detailed analyses of sub-national variation in development outcomes... her systematic engagement with diverse literatures circumvents disagreement over which came first, democracy or development, to make a field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes... Anyone concerned with institutions,development, or the role of China in the world, should read this elegantly written book."
-- Peter Katzenstein Book Prize Committee, for "best book in international relations,comparative politics, or political economy."
"The first takeaway of the book, that a poor country can harness the institutions they have and get development going is a liberating message... This provocative message challenges our prevailing practice of assessing a country's institutions by their distance from the global best practice... The second part of the book is equally thought provoking. While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation... this analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level."
--Yongmei Zhou (Director of the World Development Report 2017), World Bank Development Blog
How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime... Her unconventional insight is that the first challenge of development is to harness 'weak/wrong/bad' institutions to create markets... China wanted to begin a process of "adaptation" and for that they needed to create conditions conducive to "directed improvisation."... Professor Ang is making important advances in understanding how development can be made possible in her approach to Complexity and Development 2.0.
-- Lant Pritchett (Harvard Kennedy School), State Capability Blog
"Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state--from the center to the periphery, across time and space--has actually practiced (not merely preached) innovation, problem solving, and effective implementation... Future studies of bureaucratic life in China and elsewhere must reckon seriously with Ang's account; she has set an admirably high bar and capably filled a conspicuous scholarly vacuum. It is encouraging that the development policy community is also taking note... Her book is compelling, important, and deserving of a wide audience."
-- Michael Woolcock (World Bank), Governance
This book is a triumph, opening a window onto the political economy of China’s astonishing rise that takes as its starting point systems and complexity. Its lessons apply far beyond China’s borders... Ang reveals… [a system of] ‘directed improvisation’- a ‘paradoxical mixture of top-down direction and bottom-up improvisation’… I love this phrase, and it could easily become as prevalent and useful as Peter Evans’ ‘embedded autonomy.’ -- Duncan Green (Oxfam), LSE Review of Books
As if explaining modern Chinese economic development was not enough of a challenge, Ang has two even loftier goals. The first is methodological. She expresses a frustration with political science’s causality obsession and modeling approaches that deliver isolated snapshots of complex processes… Ang’s second ambition is to apply this coevolutionary schema to how we understand economic development generally. -- Edmund Malesky (Duke University), Perspectives on Politics
More unusual are political economy studies that formulate an argument about a recent economic development experience and argue that the principles explaining it are the same as those found in prominent approaches to economic history, thereby proposing an interpretation of economic history scholarship in light of more contemporary developments. Yuen Yuen Ang achieves precisely this with her new interpretation of China’s economic development path. Her key conceptual innovation is to bring complexity theory into the study of economic growth. -- Bin Wong (UCLA, History), Journal of Economic History
I had also not imagined that China, and its remarkable economic growth over the past four decades, would provide such a rich example of complexity principles in action. -- Keith Johnston, Cultivating Leadership Blog (New Zealand)
NAMED "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS China's transformation cannot be attributed to a single cause; rather, it arose from a contingent, interactive process—Ang calls it 'directed improvisation.' She formalizes this insight by using a novel analytic method that she terms 'coevolutionary narrative,' which has the potential to influence future studies of institutional and economic change beyond China. -- Andrew J. Nathan (Columbia University), Foreign Affairs
About the Author
Yuen Yuen Ang is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining Michigan, she was Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is a winner of the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the GDN & Gates Foundation international essay prize on the Future of Development, the Eldersveld Prize for Outstanding Research (awarded by the University of Michigan), and two Early Career Fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies.