The Political Economy of China's Systemic Transformation 1979 to the Present

After three decades of reign, Mao left China a structurally rigid and functionally inefficient economy. The imperative for systemic transformation was self-evident. By 2009, China's nominal GDP reached $4.9 trillion. Its 2010 foreign reserve is in excess of $2.4 trillion. China has surpassed Japan as the second largest economy in the world. A statistical analysis of four countries indicates political stability and social calm helped gain the confidence of needed foreign investments. For China, it is foreign investment that has been fueling its export growth which in turn is most instrumental in its development path.

Victoria Mantzopoulos is Chairperson of the Department of Political Science and the Department of Economics at the University of Detroit Mercy. She received her PhD in political science from Wayne State University. Mantzopoulos has published several books, including Probabilities and Statistics, Fundamentals in Statistics 2nd edition, Fundamentals in Statistics, Statistics for Comparative Politics and Economics, and Statistics for the Social Sciences. Raphael Shen is a Professor of Economics at the University of Detroit Mercy. He received his PhD in economics from Michigan State University and has published multiple books dealing with economies in transition, including China's Economic Reform: An Experiment in Pragmatic Socialism; The Restructuring of Romania's Economy: A Paradigm of Flexibility and Adaptability; Ukraine's Economic Reform: Obstacles, Errors, Lessons; Restructuring the Baltic Economies: Disengaging 50 Years of Integration with the U.S.S.R.; Economic Reform in Poland and Czechoslovakia: Lessons in Systematic Transformation; and The Polish Economy: Legacies from the Past, Prospects for The Future.