My chapter just published in the Cambridge Economic History of China

Credit: Amy King

I am excited to announce the long-awaited publication of the 2-volume Cambridge Economic History of China, edited by Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn. 

My chapter upends the conventional view that China’s external economic relations were autarkic and isolationist under Mao. Between 1949 and 1959, China’s foreign trade grew faster than trade growth by other developing countries and all other Asian countries, and by the late 1960s, two-thirds of China’s trade was taking place with the non-Communist world. 

I argue that five key factors (Soviet model; Cold War order; Japan; imperialism; and CCP political campaigns) shaped China’s trade, loans, foreign aid and investment ties, and Chinese ideas about the role of economics in foreign policy and relations with the outside world. 

I explore the idea of “self-reliance” (自力更生) and argue that it enabled rather than stymied China’s willingness to absorb foreign technology and learn from the industrial paths of more advanced economies like Japan. 

And though I could not have predicted that this volume would be published at a moment when we are all thinking about economic sanctions once more, my chapter shows how China’s experience of harsh US-led economic sanctions during the Mao era has shaped long-standing Chinese ideas of economic statecraft and the strategies needed to survive within the international economic order.  

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