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Branko Milanovic Profile picture
@BrankoMilan
Dec 21, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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Here is (for whoever may be interested) the list of books on China that I have read in the past 5-6 years;
in no particular order, with my assessments: 5 stars is the best, 2 the worst.
Books I reviewed on my blog are noted with ++.
John Palmer, The death of Mao, Faber & Faber, 2012 **
Jonathan Fenby, Will China dominate the 21st century, Polity, 2014 ***
Quan Yanchi, Mao: Man, not God ***
Jacques Gernet, Daily life in China on the Eve of Mongol Invasion 1250-76, Stanford UP, 1962. ****
++Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, Verso, 2007. *****
Minxin Pei, China’s crony capitalism, Harvard UP, 2016. ****
Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, Harvard UP, 2006. ***
++Martin Jacques, When China rules the world, Penguin, 2012. *****
Cheng Li, Chinese politics in the Xi Jinping era, Brookings, 2016. ***
++Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China, Harvard 2017. ****
Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the state, Simon and Schuster, 2009. ****
++Wang fan-hsi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, Columbia UP, 1991. *****
++Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, Princeton UP, 2000. *****
Alan Wood, Limits to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confucianism to a Doctrine of Political. Rights, 1995. ***
Xie Chuntao, Fighting corruption: how CPC works. 2016. ****
Wu Guoyou, The period of Den Xiaoping’s reformation ***
Chung li-Chang, Income of the Chinese Gentry, 1962. ***
++Henry Kissinger, On China, Penguin, 2011. *****
Chi Hsin, Teng Hsiao-ping: A political biography, Cosmos Books, 1978. **
Wang Hui, China’s New Order, ed Theodore Huters, Harvard, 2003. **
++Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Demain la Chine: démocratie ou dictature?, Gallimard, 2019. ***
++Ho-fung Hung, The China Boom: Why China will not rule the world, Columbia UP, 2017. *****
++Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese ended... Western domination, Penguin, 2017. ****
++Richard McGregor, Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan & the Fate of US Power..." 2017 ***
Isabella Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Routeledge, 2019.***
++Yuen Yuen Ang, China’s Gilded Age, 2020. Cambridge UP, ****
Joanna Waley Cohen, The sextants of Beijing, W. W. Norton and Co., 1999 ****
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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Feb 25
Four years ago when the Russia-Ukraine war began I wrote three pieces.
One was on short-term economic prospects of Russia.
Russia’s economic prospects: the short-run
branko2f7.substack.com/p/russias-econ…
Like most economists I was wrong. Russia did weather four years of war and loss/freezing of about $500b in reserves much better than people thought. I believed that within a year Russia would be faced by significant shortages, inflation and price controls. Nothing like that has happened so far. Why: it is a topic for research.
Then I wrote a piece on the novelty of technologically regressive import substitution. The idea there is that Russia being cut off from Western technology (on which its companies overwhelmingly relied) will have to move into replacing Western technology by the less advanced domestic technology ("regressive import substitution"). I think I was right on that.
globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/18/05/202…
Read 6 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Feb 19
In a dinner conversation w/ a friend, we said, let see in a simplest possible way which countries did well in the transition from socialism to capitalism. I then made this simple calculation: find out the average growth rate of real GDP per capita between 1985 (a "normal" socialist year) and 2024 (the latest available year for all). Here is the graph, with countries ranked in increasing order.Image
Not surprisingly, the best is Poland which in some 40 years tripled its GDP per capita (average growth 3.1%). Not surprisingly too, Ukraine is the only country with a decline in real income.
The success cases are also Albania (3%), Armenia (2.7%), Estonia, Bulgaria, Belarus (2.5-2.6%)
Slovakia did better than the Czech Republic.
All Yugoslav republics are below 2% per annum, but the best is, interestingly, Bosnia, followed by Montenegro.
Russia's 40-year growth record is a disappointing 1 percent per annum per capita. It is worse than under Brezhnev's "stagnation".
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Feb 12
Last night I could not sleep so I created a taxonomy of people who work on inequality/redistribution. For each of these groups I have names of economists but it could be too controversial. So I decided to stay with the taxonomy only.
Group A are "socialists", or people who want to change power & distribution within the key locus, locus of production. Some want to give decision-making power to workers only; others want to constraint the power of shareholders, to make workers more important in managing companies thereby changing distribution "internally". They are the most radical b/c they change the nature of capitalism in production.
Group B focuses on pre-redistribution. They leave capitalist relations of production formally the same, but they want to increase the minimum wage, empower trade unions, improve health insurance provided by companies, limit duration of work. They are meliorists like Fabians.
Read 7 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Jan 18
It is Weekend No. 7 and (as I have been doing for the past six weeks), I will now review Chapter 7 of "Visions of Inequality". It has become the most controversial part of the book b/c of its strong critique of lack of concern of neoclassical economics with income distribution.
It asks the Q: why were neoclassicists uninterested in income distribution? It provides three reasons: endogenous evolution of economics away from class structure to individual "agents" (that are all fundamentally identical); political reasons (the Cold War) and funding of the research by the rich.
It is important to realize (and very few people have) that the chapter opens up with a review of inequality studies in systems of state ownership of the means of production and makes an analogy between the denial of class structure in these societies and under capitalism; and thus why both were uninterested in studying income distribution.
No concern with class => no concern with inequality.
The most that neoclassical economics ever did in inequality studies was mere empiricism. Nothing else. No integrative study of inequality, no theories of how inequality is determined nor how it would evolve. It was in true sense what Marx called "vulgar political economy". One such example is Alan Blinder's "Theories of income distribution".Image
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Dec 19, 2025
The list (in no particular order) of the books that I liked the most and read in 2025, with their reviews:
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards
Gold, volk and IQs
branko2f7.substack.com/p/gold-volk-an…Image
David Lay Williams, “The Greatest of All Plagues”
Poison for the soul
branko2f7.substack.com/p/poison-for-t…Image
Arnaud Orain, "Le Monde Confisqué"
Capitalism of finitude: pessimism and bellicosity
branko2f7.substack.com/p/capitalism-o…Image
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Nov 22, 2025
In Chapter II of "The Great Global Transformation" I discuss opinions of key authors on whether trade (and thus globalization) lead to peace or war. I begin with Montesquieu who is famous for his doux commerce. Then continue with Smith whose views are much more complex and definitely worth reading. Then Schumpeter who in his early work believed that capitalism and trade generate peace in order to change later
when he saw monopoly capitalism with its predatory behavior and struggle for markets as a more efficient, "normal", capitalism. And I end with Hobson, Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin who regarded competition for foreign markets & raw materias as leading to wars.
So we have an entire gamut of theories, from those who see trade as promoting peace among nations to the opposite.
It is in that context that World War I becomes important. It happened in the midst of the greatest trade and capital interdependence ever (up to that date) which, according to the pro-peace view of trade, was the least war-enabling condition possible.
Hence, a very fundamental problem for pro-peace view of trade.
Read 4 tweets

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