> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://laurence-wilse-samson.gitbook.io/textbooks/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://laurence-wilse-samson.gitbook.io/textbooks/the-chinese-economy/readme.md).

# README

> **Full draft, last updated November 2026.** One of 22 textbooks freely readable online ([all books](https://lwilsesamson.com/textbooks/)), all written with AI assistance. Corrections are welcome at <laurence@lwilsesamson.com>. See the [status of this edition](/textbooks/the-chinese-economy/front-matter/edition_status.md).

## An Institutional Portrait

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of how the Chinese economy actually works—its institutions, industries, regional dynamics, and the policy frameworks that shape them. Written for professionals, graduate students, and informed readers seeking to understand the world's second-largest economy.

### What This Book Covers

**Part I: Foundations** establishes the empirical and historical groundwork—China's economic scale, the transformation from planned to market economy, and the geography of production across its vast territory.

**Part II: Institutions** examines how China is actually governed—the administrative state, policy-making processes, corruption dynamics, regulatory evolution, and the political economy of reform.

**Part III: Sectors** provides detailed analysis of key industries: manufacturing and industrial policy, finance, real estate, infrastructure, technology, energy, agriculture, and services.

**Part IV: Factor Markets** covers labor and the hukou system, demographics and human capital, capital markets, and land—the fundamental inputs that shape economic outcomes.

**Part V: Social Policy** addresses the welfare state, inequality, and healthcare—how China distributes the gains from growth.

**Part VI: External Linkages** examines China's role in global trade, exchange rate and monetary policy, and the Belt and Road Initiative.

**Part VII: Regional Economies** profiles China's major economic clusters: the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and interior growth poles.

**Part VIII: Dynamics** analyzes the 2020s disruptions, how economic shocks transmit through the system, and places China's trajectory in comparative perspective.

### The Argument

The book's claim, stated as six propositions with the chapters that carry them, is on one page: [The Argument in One Page](/textbooks/the-chinese-economy/front-matter/the_argument.md). How Chinese statistics are handled (vintages, revisions, the provincial–national gap, series breaks, debt definitions) is set out in [A Note on Sources and Chinese Data](/textbooks/the-chinese-economy/front-matter/sources_and_method.md).

### Approach

This book emphasizes:

* **Institutional detail**: How things actually work, not just theory
* **Empirical grounding**: Concrete data and specific examples
* **Historical context**: The path dependencies that shape current outcomes
* **Comparative perspective**: China in relation to other economies

### Companion Volume

This book has a companion volume on Africa, [*The African Economy: The Growth Century*](https://lwilsesamson.com/african-economic-future/), which adds an interactive data layer for all 54 African economies.

## License

All rights reserved.

## About the author

I am an economist in New York. I am Associate Director at Oxford Economics, I teach as an adjunct at NYU Wagner and Columbia SIPA, and I am a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg's Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development. I took my PhD in economics at Columbia. More at [lwilsesamson.com](https://lwilsesamson.com/).

## How this book was made

I wrote this book with substantial help from AI language models, principally Claude (Anthropic), which I used for drafting, editing, research synthesis, figure code, and consistency checking. The outline, the argument, the selection of material and the judgments throughout are mine, as is the responsibility for what remains wrong. Figures were generated from code using the sources identified in their captions; illustrative figures are labelled.

In October 2026 I revised the whole text in two further passes, also with AI help: one to remove the stock phrasing that AI drafts produce, and one to bring the prose closer to my own academic writing.

In November 2026 I had the key checkable claims in each chapter (505 in all: numbers, company facts, attributions, dates and reported findings) compared with a primary source, using AI tools for the lookups and reviewing each change myself. Each claim was confirmed, corrected, softened or cut, except 74 for which no primary source could be reached; those were left as written and flagged. This was a check of selected claims, not a line-by-line proofread, so please check numbers and quotations against the primary sources before citing them.

Please report errors to <laurence@lwilsesamson.com>. Corrections usually go live the same day.

***

*Navigate using the table of contents on the left, or start with* [*Chapter 1: The Chinese Economy in Numbers*](/textbooks/the-chinese-economy/part-i-foundations/ch01.md)*.*

*Last updated: November 2026*