1st Edition
China's Opening to the Outside World The Experiment With Foreign Capitalism
Biography
Kleinberg, Robert
"Kleinberg gives a detailed account of what the Chinese have done to introduce some capitalist activities into the country without abandoning socialism, and he makes a case for expecting this practice to continue without leading to the creation of a liberal system."
William Diebold Jr, Foreign Affairs
"Robert Kleinberg's China's "Opening" to the Outside World is a splendid and sobering piece of scholarship, combining theory and generalizations with rigorous empirical analyses of foreign trade, foreign investment, and the Special Economic Zones. Kleinberg challenges the widespread (and wishful) conventional wisdom prevalent in the West, particularly in the United States, that post-Mao China's opening up to the capitalist world in inexorably moving the country toward economic and political liberalization. In theory and practice, he argues, the post-Mao leadership has followed neither a classical Marxist, nor a neo-Marxist dependencia, nor a global interdependence model but a neomercantilist, state-centred, and state-empowering model in its foreign economic relations. He argues further that this basic bottom line is most likely to remain unchanged in the years to come. Whether or not one agrees with this, his tightly reasoned and well-documented thesis deserves to be taken very seriously. The book is also highly recommended as an irresistable text for courses in Chinese foreign policy and international relations, as it confidently bridges the gap between the two fields. This is scholarship of a high order and a major challenge to all serious students in search of China's place in the changing global political economy."
Samuel Kim, Princeton University
