William H. Overholt Books

China's Crisis of Success provides new perspectives on China's rise to superpower status, showing that China has reached a threshold where success has eliminated the conditions that enabled miraculous growth. Continued success requires re-invention of its economy and politics. The old economic strategy based on exports and infrastructure now piles up debt without producing sustainable economic growth, and Chinese society now resists the disruptive change that enabled earlier reforms. While China's leadership has produced a strategy for successful economic transition, it is struggling to manage the politics of implementing that strategy. After analysing the economics of growth, William H. Overholt explores critical social issues of the transition, notably inequality, corruption, environmental degradation, and globalisation. He argues that Xi Jinping is pursuing the riskiest political strategy of any important national leader. Alternative outcomes include continued impressive growth and political stability, Japanese-style stagnation, and a major political-economic crisis.

Long considered an overpopulated, repressive, backward country, China has in the last decade entered the small circle of advanced industrial nations. Economic reform, more than any other factor, is responsible for this progress, maintains William H. Overholt in this provocative book. In the 1980s, embracing capitalism to an increasing degree, China's economy grew at a rate of 9.5 percent. In 1992 it grew 12.8 percent, rising to 13.4 percent in 1993. Cumulatively, this is the greatest sustained growth in human history. Even if it slows substantially, it is likely to surpass the economy of the United States early in the twenty-first century. This book is an account of China's remarkable growth, told authoritatively and in unique detail by a close and astute observer.