Fault Lines in China's Economic Terrain - Softcover

Charles Wolf, Jr. (Ph.D., Economics, Harvard University), founding Dean of the Rand Graduate School, is a senior economic adviser and corporate fellow in international economics at Rand and professor in the Rand Graduate School. Benjamin Zycher (Ph.D., Economics, University of California, Los Angeles) is a senior economist, Economics and Statistics Group, at Rand.

Those who fear China should read this sobering assessment of the challenges that it may soon face.
Richard N. Cooper
Behind the facade of the emerging giant, just how fragile is China?... At a time when everyone and his investment adviser are singing China's economic praises, [this book] strings together a lot of sour notes... RAND, therefore, has done China an enormous (if unintentional) favor. It is precisely when things are going relatively well that one needs to plan for the worst... Whether or not this provocative RAND study is read in China, few, if any, of the problems cited are going to disappear on their own.
Tom Plate
The RAND volume calmly describes, analyses and calculates the potential impact that the [present] problems will have on China's growth.
Stephen Green
It is certainly worth a look from China scholars. Recommended.
CHOICE, January 2004
In November 2002 the sixteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party set China an ambitious new target: to quadruple the size of the economy by 2020. Growth will need to hum along at an average 7.4 per cent each year if the economy is really to double in size by 2010 and surpass $4 trillion by 2020. The economy has managed 9.6 per cent a year on average since 1978, and in the first half of 2003 year-on-year growth was a SARS-resilient 8.3 per cent. Is such a brisk pace sustainable?... China's 2020 vision is attainable. But making it means that all the problems already present in the economy have to be kept under control. [This] new study ... calmly describes, analyses and calculates the potential impact that the problems will have on China's growth... Moreover, as the RAND analysts admit, many of the factors are interrelated ... Vicious and virtuous circles are both possible. The point is clear: China's 2020 vision is possible, but it would not pay to believe in it blindly.
International Affairs