Book Launch: The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?

Nicholas R. Lardy discussed his latest book from the Peterson Institute, The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, at a book launch event held January 28, 2019.

China’s extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978 has set world records and has been sustained, despite repeated predictions of an inevitable slowdown or even crisis. As Lardy argued in his previous book, Markets over Mao, this ongoing success was due to the continuing rise of the Chinese private sector driven by market-oriented reforms. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, Lardy argues that China’s trend growth is now declining meaningfully for the first time since reforms were launched. Resurgent state dominance, driven from the top, has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China’s economy.  Lardy, the finest analyst of China’s economy outside China, believes that China’s future could be equally bright as its recent past but that policy choices by China’s leadership are preventing that continued success, and contributing instead to the current downturn.

Nicholas R. Lardy is the Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute. He joined the Institute in March 2003 from the Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow from 1995 until 2003. Before Brookings, he taught at the University of Washington, where he was the director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies from 1991 to 1995. From 1997 through the spring of 2000, he was also the Frederick Frank Adjunct Professor of International Trade and Finance at the Yale University School of Management. This is his fourth book for the Institute.