The in-person audience is limited to the Princeton University faculty, staff and students, with TigerCard access. Registration is required for in-person attendees.

The event will also be livestreamed via Zoom webinar and is open to the public. Zoom Registration is required.

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy, but the country’s swift ascent in recent decades was never a forgone conclusion. Reformers after Mao’s death in 1976 agreed that it was necessary for China to move towards marketization, but struggled over the right approach. Isabella Weber’s new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy uncovers the fierce reform debate that shaped China’s path, offering a novel perspective on the origins of China’s distinctive economic model. Through extensive research, Weber provides an unprecedented look at the economics that facilitated the country’s rise without leading to wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism.

Isabella M. Weber is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate has been recommended by the Financial Times and Foreign Policy. For her work on the rise of economics in China’s recent history she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Previously she was a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge during and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.

This event is co-sponsored with the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance and the Center for Contemporary China.