Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China. Harvard University Press, 2017. Hbk £31.95, $39.95.
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Even before China formally joined the IMF and the World Bank in 1980 (Jacobson and Oksenberg, 1990: 66-81), it had invited World Bank President Robert McNamara to visit, requested a World Bank mission, and embarked on what would be a development partnership of equals that has endured until today. Throughout, World Bank reports were translated into Chinese, distributed to state planners, and sold to the general public. From the start, Chinese planners and economists worked alongside World Bank officials, and the reports soon became joint productions of the Bank and the Chinese government. At the same time, China sought a wide range of advice from other sources in Eastern and Western Europe and North America. Gewirtz tells this broader story, drawing in particular on the recently available writings of reformist premier Zhao Ziyang, and while the text is by no means as original in its content as Gewirtz suggests, the story it tells - covering the period from 1976 to the declaration of the 'socialist market economy' in 1993 - is worth reading all the same. It is driven off course, however, by the prominence given to Zhao Ziyang, the neglect of developments in the real economy and in key institutions, insufficient attention to the World Bank in particular, and, at the mid-point of the narrative, the decision to make the 1985 'Bashan conference' (named for the boat on which it took place, cruising on the Yangtze River) the key point of reference, rather than the World Bank country economic report of the same year, and the longer process of engagement in which it was embedded. This, like earlier and later World Bank work, shows the Bank in a quite different light to that suggested by the well known and widely experienced pattern of imposed structural adjustment, heavy-handed conditionality and hostility to state intervention. The Chinese authorities built up their own expertise, and were 'in the driving seat' throughout, refusing conditionality, setting their own goals, and rejecting World Bank advice in crucial areas. For its part, the Bank certainly placed the emphasis consistently on strategies to build markets and promote private enterprise, as the Chinese under Deng Xiaoping and his successors had already decided to do. But it just as conspicuously chose to work within the framework set by them - in which planning and state enterprise had crucial roles - not only at the outset, but also in the early 1990s, when 'shock therapy' and privatization became the strategy of choice elsewhere at the Bank. Gewirtz is weak on this side of the story, which is central to the rise of 'global China'.
Even before Deng established himself as 'paramount leader' in 1978, China under Mao's successor Hua Guofeng had committed itself to rapid industrial growth, brought a number of economists back from the limbo into which they had been cast during the Cultural Revolution, and sent officials at different levels to visit not only Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania but also a handful of Western European countries, in order to assess styles and levels of development abroad. Deng himself visited Japan in 1978 and the United States in 1979, and as Gewirtz describes, contacts with eminent economists from the US and elsewhere were frequent thereafter - including a number of present and future Nobel prize winners. Chinese experts and leaders may have had a limited grasp of the toolbox of neoclassical economics in this period - Kenneth Arrow was taken aback to find in a 1979 seminar that only one person present had heard of 'rational expectations' (59) - but they knew what they wanted, and consistently showed confidence in their own approach and objectives, and discrimination in their adoption of new ideas and techniques. It is striking in retrospect that successive leaders and policy makers were not at all swayed by the post-1979 vogue in the West for privatisation, deregulation, and all the rest. They drew at the outset on the 'market socialist' ideas of Wlodzimierz Brus, a Polish economist then living in the UK and teaching at Wolfson College, Oxford. Brus's lecture series, delivered in late December 1979 and early January 1980 at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) advocated the decentralization of macroeconomic, enterprise and household decision-making within a framework of strong central planning and state authority, and connected strikingly with views prevalent in China at the time (67-70). If you happen not to know about this, don't make the mistake of thinking that Deng's turn away from the command economy made him some kind of neoliberal. He advocated a combination of planned regulation with market regulation, as announced on 16 January 1980 (70). This line would be followed more or less consistently thereafter, and supported, as noted, by the World Bank. Successive visits from Milton and Rose Friedman in 1980 and the reformist socialist Czech economist Ota Šik in 1981 gave an indication of the emerging consensus: the Friedmans' visit produced 'exasperation on both sides' (87), and led to nothing (as would subsequent visits on their part) while Šik's outline of a 'transitional two-track system in which the state continued to set a guidance price but allowed enterprises freedom to sell goods within certain limits of the state-set price, increasing enterprise competitiveness and efficiency' (93) prompted a high-level seminar on price reform with leading Chinese economists, the result of which was the creation of a Price Research Centre, using input-output tables to calculate prices for a system of 'socialist-commodity money relations' (94-5), and a System Reform Commission (108-9).
Gewirtz's reading of the early 1980s is that reformists were checked by conservative reaction, with the result that 'reform seemed truly stalled' (113). This strikes me as questionable, though you need to know that I have no command of the extensive Chinese material on which Gewirtz draws. An alternative reading of the material he himself presents is that the authorities, clear about their objectives but mindful that the introduction of the market within an overall framework of planning had not succeeded elsewhere, were being guided by practice (awaiting the results of tentative reforms in the countryside and Special Economic Zones, for example), letting debate take place, and, indeed, 'groping for the stones'. The consensus that emerged was for gradualism, and the use of market mechanisms within a unified plan, precisely as advocated in the report from Hu Yaobang and Chen Yun to the Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982 which Gewirtz reads as evidence for the stalling of reform. The key to it - an innovative breakthrough drawing primarily on the ideas of Brus and Šik but giving them a twist, was the system of 'dual-track prices' proposed by the newly created Institute for Chinese Economic Structural Reform in 1984, and introduced despite strong World Bank advice that it was a mistake. It was swiftly followed by the adoption of 'a planned commodity economy with public ownership as the basic form' as the formal characterisation of the Chinese approach in September of the same year (125).
This was the context, then, for China-World Bank relations in the early 1980s. Gewirtz says relatively little on this early engagement, but what he does say identifies Edwin Lim as the key intermediary, and touches without further comment on an initially surprising aspect of Bank involvement - the fact that the Bank not only brought its own advice and that of US experts (primarily Keynesians of various kinds), but was instrumental also in bringing Eastern European economists to China. Lim's own recollections (Lewis et al., 1993; Becker and Zemi, 2002; Lim, 2005) highlight the invitations to Brus and others: 'we brought in nonmembers [of the World Bank] because we thought it was very important for our work in China to understand the socialist system' (Lewis et al: 9); 'we brought in a lot of experts from Eastern Europe. We brought in Russians, Polish economists, East Germans, economists from the East but living in Western Europe, people with first-hand experience in reform in Russia, in Eastern Europe' (Becker and Zenni, 2002a: 27). Lim emphasises too that 'China drove the agenda and decided what the country needed from the Bank. The economic dialogue was always within the Chinese ideological and political limits. It was China that decided on the lending programmes, which formed a part of its overall investment plans' (Lim, 2005: 107). Gewirtz appears unfamiliar with the detail of these early reports, particularly that of 1985 (World Bank, 1985), which he deals with in a few lines, noting that 'Zhao ordered his economic lieutenants to study the report for both "content and method", according to Wu Jinglian' (134). Lim suggests more, saying that Zhao 'was always quoting from the report in internal meetings' (Lewis et al, 1993: 7), and that it 'essentially drew up a blueprint for Chinese reforms and development over the next twenty years' (Becker and Zemi, 2002: 26). This may not be an exaggeration. It was not only widely circulated by Zhao, but translated and sold in bookstores (Bottelier, 2006: 10). Directly commissioned by Deng and Zhao, it was the product of a mission led by Lim and Adrian Wood in 1984, conducted in close consultation with the State Planning and State Economic Commissions, numerous ministries, and academics from various universities and research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The content is striking, and needed more detailed analysis. It began with the framing statement that 'China's ultimate economic objective is to catch up with the developed countries, while maintaining a socialist system in which the benefits of prosperity are widely shared' (World Bank, 1985: 1); it took the Chinese government's own targets as its starting point, noting 'the newly established view in China that planning and markets can coexist and develop harmoniously' (ibid: 178); and it endorsed the 'invigoration of state enterprises' as the principal means to greater economic efficiency, adding that 'the state must retain the ability to direct the overall pace and pattern of development' (ibid: 8): 'The essence - and the difficulty - of a successful and comprehensive reform thus lies not only in bringing together the several elements of market regulation, but also in combining them with an appropriately modified system of planning' (ibid: 8-9). The latter would centre on a mix of direct and indirect controls, and the use of medium-term plans as 'the core of the entire planning system' (ibid: 179), coordinated by the State Planning Commission and set in the context of a broad longer-term view looking fifteen to twenty-five years ahead. Aligning with the Central Committee's decision in 1984 that enterprises should be subject to competition within a framework of central direction, it recommended that key utilities at a minimum - electricity, railways and telecommunications - should 'remain subject to direct government control and should not primarily pursue profit', and other state enterprises should be run by boards of directors drawn from several different state institutions, while collective and community enterprises 'could in the future constitute a significant proportion of China's medium-size enterprises' (ibid: 9). Within this framework, enterprises should be allowed to diversify freely into new markets, and move workers from unprofitable areas to profitable ones, 'including technologically dynamic sectors' (ibid: 10), while state sector wages should remain under administrative control. Essentially, then, the Bank proposed the institutionalisation of 'creative destruction' in a framework of directly and indirectly state-controlled state, collective and community production, and even sketched the outlines of a possible 'socialist financial market' (ibid: 14), while proposing competitiveness in international markets as a 'not-too-distant' objective (ibid: 15). Sustainable rapid growth, the report concluded, would depend upon 'reforming the system of economic management, including coordinated progress on three fronts': 'First is greater use of market regulation to stimulate innovation and efficiency. Second is stronger planning, combining indirect with direct economic control. Third is modification and extension of social institutions and policies to maintain the fairness in distribution that is fundamental to socialism, despite the greater inequality and instability that market regulation and indirect controls would tend to cause' (ibid: 19). And it added, endorsing the strategy of 'feeling for the stones', that the extent of the challenge 'argues for a gradual advance, with experimentation and evaluation at each step' (ibid: 20). From this point on, Bottelier (2006: 11) reports, 'the World Bank produced an economic report on China almost every year': 'Often, the underlying studies were undertaken at the request of Chinese counterpart agencies who almost always participated in them. ... World Bank reports were more widely distributed and used in China in the 1980s and early 1990s than in any other member country'.
By treating the 'Bashan Boat Conference' as 'the cruise that changed China' (Gewirtz 2016), in isolation from this context, Gewirtz throws the spotlight too much onto personalities and a single event, claiming as its central lessons - the need for hard budget constraints on enterprises, expanded commodity and capital markets, and a shift from direct to indirect management of enterprises and the economy (154; cf. 191) - topics that had already been worked through in detail in 1984. His focus then turns to debates between Chinese economists, with little reference to material developments in the economy. Again, the emerging focus on enterprise reform (174-5), the various changes introduced by the State Council in 1986 (177-8), the application to join the GATT in the same year, the contract responsibility system introduced in 1987, Zhao's call at the 13th Party Congress in the same year to 'gradually shrink the scope of compulsory plans and gradually transform to a management system of primarily indirect management' (191) and the subsequent designing of medium-term reform plans (194) can all be traced back to the World Bank 1985 report and earlier initiatives. Gewirtz is seriously off beam, then, both in seeing the 13th Party Congress slogan 'the state manages the market, and the market guides the enterprises' as new, and in proclaiming this as 'a full-throated endorsement of the essential role of the market' (191-2). We see, then, but through a glass, darkly - not so much because the influence of the World bank is underestimated (as noted, the 1985 report was unequivocally the joint product of the Bank and Chinese experts and authorities, with an agenda defined and controlled by Deng and Zhao) but because the evolution of policy through Chinese institutions and initiatives is given second place to an unduly personalised and largely inconsequential discussion of foreign visits, experts and ideas and one-off events and exchanges, mixed in with a narrative on impulses towards democratic reform, Tiananmen Square, and the fall of Zhao Ziyang. As a consequence, the focus drifts away from the 'making of global China', returning to it only with the appointment of Zhu Rongji as premier in 1990. It is here that failure to engage with World Bank activity is most damaging. This was a period in which the Bank was very influential, after Shahid Javed Burki, engaged with China since the 1960s, when he investigated communal agriculture, and country director since 1987, returned to China immediately after Tiananmen Square, and fought for continuation of the programme (Becker and Zenni, 2002b: 12-20). Crucially, Burki resisted both the emerging consensus at the Bank in favour of 'shock therapy', as advocated and practiced by Jeffrey Sachs, and the equally prevailing view that support for state enterprises should only be given where there was a clear commitment to eventual privatization (Lewis et al, 1993b: 17-20). The range and character of sectoral and policy studies carried out before and after 1989 needed detailed scrutiny, as does the 1990 country study (World Bank, 1990).
There are some shortcomings here, then, of which readers should be aware. The suggestion that Jacobson and Oksenberg (1990) make 'only deprecating mention of the World Bank's intellectual influences' (ft. 15, p. 282) along with the failure to acknowledge or draw further upon what is a balanced and insightful analysis that gives ample evidence of the scale and character of the Bank's intellectual and institutional contribution is a serious error of fact and judgement; the fixation upon the importance of academic credentials from Harvard or Yale (and occasionally Oxford) is a minor irritation, but reflective all the same of a persistent narrowness of focus; and the suggestion in the conclusion that China has become distrustful and even hostile to foreign influence (261), backed by the pompous assertion that it will be 'deeply regrettable if the current leadership continues to sideline international engagements as one of the signature achievements of the reform era in China' (275) is as dangerous as it is ill-informed. It ignores the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the widespread international welcome the initiative received (the White House being the singular exception), and it continues by other means the policy of isolation and demonisation pursued by Obama and Hillary Clinton and since stepped up by Trump. Xi Jinping's speech at Davos in January 2017, made just prior to the publication of this book, suggests that Gewirtz has got things entirely the wrong way round. A lively read, then, with some valuable information, but not a text to be trusted.
References
Bottelier, Pieter (2006), China and the World Bank: How a Partnership Was Built, Working Paper 277, Stanford Center for International Development, Stanford University.
Gewirtz, Julian (2016), 'The Cruise that Changed China', Foreign Affairs, 95, 6, 101-109.
Jacobson, Harold K. and Michael Oksenberg (1990), China's Participation in the IMF, the World Bank, and GATT, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Becker, William H. and Marie T. Zenni (2002a), 'Transcript of an interview with Edwin R. Lim', World Bank Group Oral History Programme, World Bank, Washington.
Becker, William H. and Marie T. Zenni (2002b), 'Transcript of an interview with Shahid Javed Burki', World Bank Group Oral History Programme, World Bank, Washington.
Lewis, John, Richard Webb and Devesh Kapur (1993a), 'Transcript of an interview with Edwin R. Lim', World Bank Group Oral History Project, Brookings Institution, Washington.
Lewis, John, Richard Webb and Devesh Kapur (1993b), 'Transcript of an interview with Shahid Javed Burki', World Bank Group Oral History Project, Brookings Institution, Washington.
Lim, Edwin (2005), 'Learning and Working with the Giants', in Indermit S. Gill and Todd Pugatch, eds, At the Frontlines of Development: Reflections from the World Bank, World Bank, Washington DC, pp. 89-120.
World Bank (1985), China: Long-Term Development Issues and Options, World Bank/Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and London.
World Bank (1990), China : Between Plan and Market, World Bank Country Study, World Bank, Washington DC.
Even before Deng established himself as 'paramount leader' in 1978, China under Mao's successor Hua Guofeng had committed itself to rapid industrial growth, brought a number of economists back from the limbo into which they had been cast during the Cultural Revolution, and sent officials at different levels to visit not only Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania but also a handful of Western European countries, in order to assess styles and levels of development abroad. Deng himself visited Japan in 1978 and the United States in 1979, and as Gewirtz describes, contacts with eminent economists from the US and elsewhere were frequent thereafter - including a number of present and future Nobel prize winners. Chinese experts and leaders may have had a limited grasp of the toolbox of neoclassical economics in this period - Kenneth Arrow was taken aback to find in a 1979 seminar that only one person present had heard of 'rational expectations' (59) - but they knew what they wanted, and consistently showed confidence in their own approach and objectives, and discrimination in their adoption of new ideas and techniques. It is striking in retrospect that successive leaders and policy makers were not at all swayed by the post-1979 vogue in the West for privatisation, deregulation, and all the rest. They drew at the outset on the 'market socialist' ideas of Wlodzimierz Brus, a Polish economist then living in the UK and teaching at Wolfson College, Oxford. Brus's lecture series, delivered in late December 1979 and early January 1980 at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) advocated the decentralization of macroeconomic, enterprise and household decision-making within a framework of strong central planning and state authority, and connected strikingly with views prevalent in China at the time (67-70). If you happen not to know about this, don't make the mistake of thinking that Deng's turn away from the command economy made him some kind of neoliberal. He advocated a combination of planned regulation with market regulation, as announced on 16 January 1980 (70). This line would be followed more or less consistently thereafter, and supported, as noted, by the World Bank. Successive visits from Milton and Rose Friedman in 1980 and the reformist socialist Czech economist Ota Šik in 1981 gave an indication of the emerging consensus: the Friedmans' visit produced 'exasperation on both sides' (87), and led to nothing (as would subsequent visits on their part) while Šik's outline of a 'transitional two-track system in which the state continued to set a guidance price but allowed enterprises freedom to sell goods within certain limits of the state-set price, increasing enterprise competitiveness and efficiency' (93) prompted a high-level seminar on price reform with leading Chinese economists, the result of which was the creation of a Price Research Centre, using input-output tables to calculate prices for a system of 'socialist-commodity money relations' (94-5), and a System Reform Commission (108-9).
Gewirtz's reading of the early 1980s is that reformists were checked by conservative reaction, with the result that 'reform seemed truly stalled' (113). This strikes me as questionable, though you need to know that I have no command of the extensive Chinese material on which Gewirtz draws. An alternative reading of the material he himself presents is that the authorities, clear about their objectives but mindful that the introduction of the market within an overall framework of planning had not succeeded elsewhere, were being guided by practice (awaiting the results of tentative reforms in the countryside and Special Economic Zones, for example), letting debate take place, and, indeed, 'groping for the stones'. The consensus that emerged was for gradualism, and the use of market mechanisms within a unified plan, precisely as advocated in the report from Hu Yaobang and Chen Yun to the Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982 which Gewirtz reads as evidence for the stalling of reform. The key to it - an innovative breakthrough drawing primarily on the ideas of Brus and Šik but giving them a twist, was the system of 'dual-track prices' proposed by the newly created Institute for Chinese Economic Structural Reform in 1984, and introduced despite strong World Bank advice that it was a mistake. It was swiftly followed by the adoption of 'a planned commodity economy with public ownership as the basic form' as the formal characterisation of the Chinese approach in September of the same year (125).
This was the context, then, for China-World Bank relations in the early 1980s. Gewirtz says relatively little on this early engagement, but what he does say identifies Edwin Lim as the key intermediary, and touches without further comment on an initially surprising aspect of Bank involvement - the fact that the Bank not only brought its own advice and that of US experts (primarily Keynesians of various kinds), but was instrumental also in bringing Eastern European economists to China. Lim's own recollections (Lewis et al., 1993; Becker and Zemi, 2002; Lim, 2005) highlight the invitations to Brus and others: 'we brought in nonmembers [of the World Bank] because we thought it was very important for our work in China to understand the socialist system' (Lewis et al: 9); 'we brought in a lot of experts from Eastern Europe. We brought in Russians, Polish economists, East Germans, economists from the East but living in Western Europe, people with first-hand experience in reform in Russia, in Eastern Europe' (Becker and Zenni, 2002a: 27). Lim emphasises too that 'China drove the agenda and decided what the country needed from the Bank. The economic dialogue was always within the Chinese ideological and political limits. It was China that decided on the lending programmes, which formed a part of its overall investment plans' (Lim, 2005: 107). Gewirtz appears unfamiliar with the detail of these early reports, particularly that of 1985 (World Bank, 1985), which he deals with in a few lines, noting that 'Zhao ordered his economic lieutenants to study the report for both "content and method", according to Wu Jinglian' (134). Lim suggests more, saying that Zhao 'was always quoting from the report in internal meetings' (Lewis et al, 1993: 7), and that it 'essentially drew up a blueprint for Chinese reforms and development over the next twenty years' (Becker and Zemi, 2002: 26). This may not be an exaggeration. It was not only widely circulated by Zhao, but translated and sold in bookstores (Bottelier, 2006: 10). Directly commissioned by Deng and Zhao, it was the product of a mission led by Lim and Adrian Wood in 1984, conducted in close consultation with the State Planning and State Economic Commissions, numerous ministries, and academics from various universities and research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The content is striking, and needed more detailed analysis. It began with the framing statement that 'China's ultimate economic objective is to catch up with the developed countries, while maintaining a socialist system in which the benefits of prosperity are widely shared' (World Bank, 1985: 1); it took the Chinese government's own targets as its starting point, noting 'the newly established view in China that planning and markets can coexist and develop harmoniously' (ibid: 178); and it endorsed the 'invigoration of state enterprises' as the principal means to greater economic efficiency, adding that 'the state must retain the ability to direct the overall pace and pattern of development' (ibid: 8): 'The essence - and the difficulty - of a successful and comprehensive reform thus lies not only in bringing together the several elements of market regulation, but also in combining them with an appropriately modified system of planning' (ibid: 8-9). The latter would centre on a mix of direct and indirect controls, and the use of medium-term plans as 'the core of the entire planning system' (ibid: 179), coordinated by the State Planning Commission and set in the context of a broad longer-term view looking fifteen to twenty-five years ahead. Aligning with the Central Committee's decision in 1984 that enterprises should be subject to competition within a framework of central direction, it recommended that key utilities at a minimum - electricity, railways and telecommunications - should 'remain subject to direct government control and should not primarily pursue profit', and other state enterprises should be run by boards of directors drawn from several different state institutions, while collective and community enterprises 'could in the future constitute a significant proportion of China's medium-size enterprises' (ibid: 9). Within this framework, enterprises should be allowed to diversify freely into new markets, and move workers from unprofitable areas to profitable ones, 'including technologically dynamic sectors' (ibid: 10), while state sector wages should remain under administrative control. Essentially, then, the Bank proposed the institutionalisation of 'creative destruction' in a framework of directly and indirectly state-controlled state, collective and community production, and even sketched the outlines of a possible 'socialist financial market' (ibid: 14), while proposing competitiveness in international markets as a 'not-too-distant' objective (ibid: 15). Sustainable rapid growth, the report concluded, would depend upon 'reforming the system of economic management, including coordinated progress on three fronts': 'First is greater use of market regulation to stimulate innovation and efficiency. Second is stronger planning, combining indirect with direct economic control. Third is modification and extension of social institutions and policies to maintain the fairness in distribution that is fundamental to socialism, despite the greater inequality and instability that market regulation and indirect controls would tend to cause' (ibid: 19). And it added, endorsing the strategy of 'feeling for the stones', that the extent of the challenge 'argues for a gradual advance, with experimentation and evaluation at each step' (ibid: 20). From this point on, Bottelier (2006: 11) reports, 'the World Bank produced an economic report on China almost every year': 'Often, the underlying studies were undertaken at the request of Chinese counterpart agencies who almost always participated in them. ... World Bank reports were more widely distributed and used in China in the 1980s and early 1990s than in any other member country'.
By treating the 'Bashan Boat Conference' as 'the cruise that changed China' (Gewirtz 2016), in isolation from this context, Gewirtz throws the spotlight too much onto personalities and a single event, claiming as its central lessons - the need for hard budget constraints on enterprises, expanded commodity and capital markets, and a shift from direct to indirect management of enterprises and the economy (154; cf. 191) - topics that had already been worked through in detail in 1984. His focus then turns to debates between Chinese economists, with little reference to material developments in the economy. Again, the emerging focus on enterprise reform (174-5), the various changes introduced by the State Council in 1986 (177-8), the application to join the GATT in the same year, the contract responsibility system introduced in 1987, Zhao's call at the 13th Party Congress in the same year to 'gradually shrink the scope of compulsory plans and gradually transform to a management system of primarily indirect management' (191) and the subsequent designing of medium-term reform plans (194) can all be traced back to the World Bank 1985 report and earlier initiatives. Gewirtz is seriously off beam, then, both in seeing the 13th Party Congress slogan 'the state manages the market, and the market guides the enterprises' as new, and in proclaiming this as 'a full-throated endorsement of the essential role of the market' (191-2). We see, then, but through a glass, darkly - not so much because the influence of the World bank is underestimated (as noted, the 1985 report was unequivocally the joint product of the Bank and Chinese experts and authorities, with an agenda defined and controlled by Deng and Zhao) but because the evolution of policy through Chinese institutions and initiatives is given second place to an unduly personalised and largely inconsequential discussion of foreign visits, experts and ideas and one-off events and exchanges, mixed in with a narrative on impulses towards democratic reform, Tiananmen Square, and the fall of Zhao Ziyang. As a consequence, the focus drifts away from the 'making of global China', returning to it only with the appointment of Zhu Rongji as premier in 1990. It is here that failure to engage with World Bank activity is most damaging. This was a period in which the Bank was very influential, after Shahid Javed Burki, engaged with China since the 1960s, when he investigated communal agriculture, and country director since 1987, returned to China immediately after Tiananmen Square, and fought for continuation of the programme (Becker and Zenni, 2002b: 12-20). Crucially, Burki resisted both the emerging consensus at the Bank in favour of 'shock therapy', as advocated and practiced by Jeffrey Sachs, and the equally prevailing view that support for state enterprises should only be given where there was a clear commitment to eventual privatization (Lewis et al, 1993b: 17-20). The range and character of sectoral and policy studies carried out before and after 1989 needed detailed scrutiny, as does the 1990 country study (World Bank, 1990).
There are some shortcomings here, then, of which readers should be aware. The suggestion that Jacobson and Oksenberg (1990) make 'only deprecating mention of the World Bank's intellectual influences' (ft. 15, p. 282) along with the failure to acknowledge or draw further upon what is a balanced and insightful analysis that gives ample evidence of the scale and character of the Bank's intellectual and institutional contribution is a serious error of fact and judgement; the fixation upon the importance of academic credentials from Harvard or Yale (and occasionally Oxford) is a minor irritation, but reflective all the same of a persistent narrowness of focus; and the suggestion in the conclusion that China has become distrustful and even hostile to foreign influence (261), backed by the pompous assertion that it will be 'deeply regrettable if the current leadership continues to sideline international engagements as one of the signature achievements of the reform era in China' (275) is as dangerous as it is ill-informed. It ignores the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the widespread international welcome the initiative received (the White House being the singular exception), and it continues by other means the policy of isolation and demonisation pursued by Obama and Hillary Clinton and since stepped up by Trump. Xi Jinping's speech at Davos in January 2017, made just prior to the publication of this book, suggests that Gewirtz has got things entirely the wrong way round. A lively read, then, with some valuable information, but not a text to be trusted.
References
Bottelier, Pieter (2006), China and the World Bank: How a Partnership Was Built, Working Paper 277, Stanford Center for International Development, Stanford University.
Gewirtz, Julian (2016), 'The Cruise that Changed China', Foreign Affairs, 95, 6, 101-109.
Jacobson, Harold K. and Michael Oksenberg (1990), China's Participation in the IMF, the World Bank, and GATT, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Becker, William H. and Marie T. Zenni (2002a), 'Transcript of an interview with Edwin R. Lim', World Bank Group Oral History Programme, World Bank, Washington.
Becker, William H. and Marie T. Zenni (2002b), 'Transcript of an interview with Shahid Javed Burki', World Bank Group Oral History Programme, World Bank, Washington.
Lewis, John, Richard Webb and Devesh Kapur (1993a), 'Transcript of an interview with Edwin R. Lim', World Bank Group Oral History Project, Brookings Institution, Washington.
Lewis, John, Richard Webb and Devesh Kapur (1993b), 'Transcript of an interview with Shahid Javed Burki', World Bank Group Oral History Project, Brookings Institution, Washington.
Lim, Edwin (2005), 'Learning and Working with the Giants', in Indermit S. Gill and Todd Pugatch, eds, At the Frontlines of Development: Reflections from the World Bank, World Bank, Washington DC, pp. 89-120.
World Bank (1985), China: Long-Term Development Issues and Options, World Bank/Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and London.
World Bank (1990), China : Between Plan and Market, World Bank Country Study, World Bank, Washington DC.