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Branko Milanovic Profile picture
@BrankoMilan
Dec 21, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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
May 10
I mentioned most of this (informally) at a Europa conference in Madrid several days ago.
Europe should stop living in the 1990s. There is no End of History anymore. Things have changed.
EU's economy is declining but it continues to dispense gratuitous lessons to the world. Latvia teaches China--a country that has performed the greatest economic miracle in history--what it should do.
In foreign affairs, EU results are negative to disastrous.
It started the war in Libya and left the country in permanent ruin & civil war.
Most of EU members participated in the illegal war on Iraq which, like the Russan war against Ukraine, was in clear violation of the UN charter. It is bizarre that they now complain.
EU has produced no plans or blueprint to end the war in Ukraine. It simply criticizes Trump's.
It has willfully ignored the war in Gaza and de facto supported mass ethnic cleansing and worse (the G word).
It has done nothing to reduce conflicts in Africa, a continent to which it is the closest.
It has gratuitously, through its propaganda, made relations with China worse.
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
May 1
Every couple of years, a fundamental misunderstanding between the East and the West of Europe reappears re. the WW2. In the occupied Western parts, life went on as before. Sartre continued writing & his plays were shown in theaters. Simone kept on sipping coffee at Les deux magots. Literary soirees were celebrated. People went to their jobs. Some food items became unavailable, and people listened to Radio London. Life in Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, Amsterdam went on as before except for occasional raids on Jewish people.
In countries that were Nazi allies, things were even better: Italy, Austria (Anschluss), Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Vichy France: things were broadly normal. Many more joined Nazi militia and Waffen SS than resistance.
In countries, that were neutral but in realty pro-Nazi (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain) life went on normally too. In a really neutral Portugal, even more so. My favorites are restaurants in Barcelona that opened up in 1943.
So that was the war in the West.
In the East, it was entirely different. It was a war of extermination. Not only because of the Holocaust (esp. in Poland & USSR), but also because of 3 million Soviet POW who were starved to death in iron cages...
Read 6 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Apr 13
A strange disease has taken hold of the left: to bemoan loss of wealth of billionaires, The billionaires' commander-in-chief has decided to cut to size other billionaires. He has driven the stock market down. It is understandable that other billionaire and their think-tanks decry such a policy. But why should the left do the it?
Esp. if you know that in the US and other advanced economies 60% of households have 0 or trivial amount of income from financial wealth. Moreover, financial income for the other 40% is so heavily concentrated that the losers are only 3-4% of the population--the richest ones. The measure is clearly super progressive.
(My next Substack on this theme.)
Percentage of country’s population that has zero or negligible annual income from capital ownership Image
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Feb 23
What were the great revolutions I witnessed in my life?
The first & really big was the Iranian revolution. I had many Iranian friends. They were all anti-Pahlavi. But quickly they split into two or three camps. The revolution had global resonance: I remember that my father disagreed with my mother over it. In Belgrade! They had no dog in the fight. But it was big.
Reagan's revolution was also big. He upended things. Pushed back against the USSR that foolishly invaded Afghanistan the year before & not only went into a war it could not win, but challenged the basis of the Cold War order. Reagan was a Cold Warrior who wished for peace.
The third was Solidarnosc & Walesa. They not only came suddenly from nowhere but created a 10-milkon strong workers' movement in opposition to a (seemingly) workers' state. It reshuffled all ideological stereotypes. It was impossible to classify as left or right.
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Nov 21, 2024
Consider income composition in socialism and developed capitalism. They are fairly similar. The differences are in the lack of income from K, greater family-related transfers, and quasi-absence of direct taxes (other than proportional flat wage taxes) in socialism. Image
Then extremely low skill premium of 3-5% vs 18-70% for West European countries (and even more in the US). Image
Then, much less redistributive social transfers. While UK/Ireland had very pro-poor transfers, socialist countries had flat transfers. Thransfers depended on family composition and were about the same regardless of underlying income. Image
Read 4 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Nov 21, 2024
This is the second year that in my teaching I spend two hours discussing income inequality under socialism, the way it was, not normative stuff. The most important thing is to tell students that socialism is not capitalism with less inequality. The logic of the system was entirely different.
The salient points.
Nationalization of capital & end of incomes from K reduces inequality directly.
Wage compression: very low skill premium. Explained both by free schooling and ideological preference for less skilled workers.
Relatively large (but not larger than in modern capitalism) social transfers directed toward families and old-age persons.
Large but almost totally flat direct taxes, mostly in the for of a wage tax.
Read 5 tweets

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