Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle reads into the Chinese politics and economy and the disparate status and position of the two domains. On one hand, its economy has sustained a near 10 per cent growth rate for 30 years, while, on the other, trapped in an incomplete transition from a totalitarian to a democratic market economy, politically the country is still considered a fragile state. This book helps the reader resolve this incongruity through its inference.
The defining features of this book are:
- Armed with an original application of Michal Kalecki’s theory of intermediate regimes, it provides an explanation of China’s explosive growth.
- It indicates the formation of a new stratum, through winding up of centralised planning, the stratum of ‘proto-bourgeoisie’, consisting of the local cadres of the communist party, who can counter the central cadres for capturing investible resources of the state.
- It creates a single politic-economic model that explains China’s economic and political development. The causal connections in the model make it possible to predict China’s future, and the challenges it faces.
This book makes a significant contribution to the literature on Chinese political economy over the past three decades. It is a must read for all discerning and informed readers. It will also be valuable for policy makers and students and researchers working in the areas of international relations, Chinese studies and political economy.
Prem Shankar Jha is an independent columnist, a prolific author and a former information adviser, Prime Minister’s Office (India). He completed his master’s in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Oxford in 1961. After working for five years for the United Nations Development Programme in New York and Damascus, he returned to India to pursue a career in journalism. Over the past few decades, he has been Editor in The Economic Times, The Financial Express, and Hindustan Times, and the Economic Editor in The Times of India.
Jha has been a visiting scholar at Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University; University of Virginia; University of Richmond and the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata. He began research on alternate fuels in 1980. He has written extensively on them and their significance for the environment. In 1985, he was nominated to the energy panel of the World Commission on Environment and Development. In 1988, he was awarded the Energy Journalist of the Year award by the International Association for Energy Economics.
Jha has many published works to his credit. Some of them are given as follows: India: A Political Economy of Stagnation (1980), In the Eye of the Cyclone: The Crisis in Indian Democracy (1993), A Jobless Future: Political Causes of Economic Crisis (2002), The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China (2002), The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947 (2003), The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War (2006), Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle (SAGE, 2009), A Planet in Peril (2009) and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West? (2010).
