The single most stunning economic story of the last half-century has been the rise of China. Its state-led development has unleashed an explosive economic expansion unprecedented in modern history.

But the astonishing growth record is far from a triumph of the free market. In How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers a compelling and fascinating account of the economic reforms and debates in China over the last fifty years.

She demonstrates how, by choosing an alternative path to the “shock therapy” that swallowed up the ex-Soviet bloc of the 1990s, China has avoided the kind of decline in state capacity that’s made COVID-19 such a disaster for the West.