Justin Yifu Lin, Cambridge University Press, 330 pages, $27.99
Proud of his country's successes yet reasonably frank about its failings, Justin Yifu Lin sets forth to correct misperceptions about China's past and shed light on its future.
The chief economist of the World Bank delivers a pragmatic history of economic cause and effect -- an insider's account of why China, which dominated the world economy right into the 19th century, fell so far behind the West and how it came roaring back.
The reason China missed the scientific and industrial revolutions is now well known: Rigorous civil-service examinations that emphasized Confucianism left ambitious people with little time for mathematics or scientific experiments, as Lin says.
Meanwhile, China's efforts to leap into the league of advanced industrial economies proved futile, Lin says, because it defied the country's comparative advantages, a theme threading throughout this book. Heavy industry requires large capital outlays and creates relatively few jobs. Mao's China had the opposite: scarce capital and abundant labor.
It took a second generation of leaders under Deng Xiaoping to adopt a strategy in 1978 that tapped the country's comparative advantage. Market reforms inadvertently encouraged rural households to take responsibility for their own gains and losses.
Farm output soared. Impressed, the government began extending market-oriented policies to cities in 1985. The rest is economic history.
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