ACLS Fellows' Publications

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

by Yuen Yuen Ang F’09, F’08. Now available from Cornell University Press.

Before markets opened in 1978, China was an impoverished planned economy governed by a Maoist bureaucracy. In just three decades it evolved into the world’s second-largest economy and is today guided by highly entrepreneurial bureaucrats. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang explains this astonishing metamorphosis. Rather than insist that either strong institutions of good governance foster markets or that growth enables good governance, Ang lays out a new, dynamic framework for understanding development broadly. Successful development, she contends, is a coevolutionary process in which markets and governments mutually adapt.

By mapping this coevolution, Ang reveals a startling conclusion: poor and weak countries can escape the poverty trap by first harnessing weak institutions—features that defy norms of good governance—to build markets. Further, she stresses that adaptive processes, though essential for development, do not automatically occur. Highlighting three universal roadblocks to adaptation, Ang identifies how Chinese reformers crafted enabling conditions for effective improvisation.

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap offers the most complete synthesis to date of the numerous interacting forces that have shaped China’s dramatic makeover and the problems it faces today. Looking beyond China, Ang also traces the coevolutionary sequence of development in late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, and finds surprising parallels among these otherwise disparate cases. Indispensable to all who care about development, this groundbreaking book challenges the convention of linear thinking and points to an alternative path out of poverty traps.

Related links:

• Book review by World Bank
  

Local Histories in Global Perspective: A Local Elite Fellowship in the Port City of Quanzhou in Seventeenth-Century China

by Guotong Li F’15. Now available in the Frontiers of History in China journal distributed by Higher Education Press.

The Great Mosque of Quanzhou, as a distinctive community center, bound its residents through religious, professional, and educational ties; it also linked the mosque community to other communities with bonds of shared Muslim identity and minority status. The Great Mosque was rebuilt in 1609 under the supervision of the Confucian scholar Li Guangjin. This significant event is evidence of a local elite fellowship in seventeenth-century Quanzhou consisting of three well-known Confucian scholars—Li Zhi, Li Guangjin, and He Qiaoyuan—who had close ties to their Muslim neighbors. They left meticulous records of merchants, particularly Muslim traders. This paper focuses on the fellowship among the three men in order to investigate Quanzhou’s connections to the broader world of global commercial and religious networks and to look more closely at local community life.

Grants for Conferences/Workshops in China Studies

The symposium “Ideas of Asia in the Museum” took place on January 23-24, 2015 at the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Brown Auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Scholars of Asian art and Asian studies from around the world, as well as colleagues from local and national museums, held multi-disciplinary discussions on a wide array of topics related to Asian art collections worldwide. The event celebrated a new partnership between a university, USC, and the Pacific Asia Museum.

“The symposium offered a uniquely Pan-Asian context within which to understand the representations of China in museums across the globe,” reported Sonya Lee, the organizer of the conference.

The event was funded by a grant from the initiative on Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society, which is supported financially by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. This program is part of the ACLS Programs in China Studies.

For information on the current competition, please visit:
http://acls.org/programs/chinese-culture/.  Grants are available for planning meetings, workshops (for sharing work in progress in a seminar setting), and conferences for more formal presentation of research.

ACLS also offers Collaborative Reading-Workshop Grants in China Studies for intensive interdisciplinary reading of texts.

The deadline for applications is November 4, 2015.