China in the World Market: Chinese Industry and International Sources of Reform in the Post-Mao Era

by Thomas G. Moore

• ISBN13: 9780521664424
• ISBN10: 052166442X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In a book that reframes our thinking about the nature of China's reform and opening, Thomas Moore argues that the structuring impact of the international political economy represents one of the most theoretically important yet inadequately studied issues concerning change in post-Mao China. After carefully defining his conceptual framework, Moore presents detailed case studies of textiles and shipbuilding to examine the impact of varying degrees of economic openness in the world trading system on the reform, restructuring, and rationalization of Chinese industries. As the book amply demonstrates, the international environment most propitious for change in China's textile and shipbuilding industries during the 1980s and 1990s was one marked by moderate economic closure rather then the ideal-typic economic openness assumed by most observers. Moore also challenges popular notions of China's recent economic success by arguing that Beijing's ability to pursue strategic industrial policy is actually quite limited.

Table of Contents

1. China as a latecomer in world industrial markets

2. The outside world as an impetus for change in China

3. Tailor to the world: China's emergence as a global power in textiles

4. Beating the system with industrial restructuring: China's response to the multifiber arrangement (MFA)

5. China looms large: reform and rationalization in the textile industry

6. Industrial change in the shadow of the MFA: the role of top-level strategy, mid-level intervention, and low-level demand in China's textile industry

7. Chinese shipbuilding: the modest origins of an emerging industrial giant

8. Dangerous currents: navigating boom and bust cycles in international shipbuilding

9. Chinese shipbuilding and global surplus capacity: making a virtue out of necessity

10. Market-oriented solutions for industrial adjustment: the changing pattern of state intervention in Chinese shipbuilding

11. Who did what to whom?: making sense of the reform process in China's shipbuilding industry

12. External shocks, state capacity, and national responses for economic adjustment: explaining industrial change in China

13. China in the contemporary international political economy

Appendix: contours of the research effort.