Politics Theory Other // How China escaped shock therapy w/ Isabella Weber

Tribune Radio

At the end of the 1980s, China's leaders came close to implementing the kind of economic shock therapy reforms that a few years later caused a social and economic catastrophe in the former Soviet Union and much of eastern Europe. A moment of enormous significance for Chinese and world history, Isabella Weber explains how and why China came to the brink of initiating an economic "big bang", and why ultimately the leadership chose to pursue a gradualist process of market reform instead.