Please note the new time and location for our 2017-18 lecture series.

Attempts to explain China's development all suffer from a “blind men and elephant" problem: depending on when and where one looks within China, every theory is development is correct, yet none is complete. What then is the grand picture of China's great economic and institutional transformation? The answer lies in the sequence of strategies, rather than in any particular factor. In China, the first step of development was paradoxically to kick-start markets using "weak/wrong/backward" institutions.

Yuen Yuen Ang is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and a Faculty Associate at the U-M Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. She is the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, Series in Political Economy, 2016), which won the 2017 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize for “outstanding book in international relations, comparative politics, or political economy.”

An op-ed on her talk is available at this link: https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-harnessing-weak-institutions-to-build-markets-90920