1The subject of this volume by Wang Feng—professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine—is China’s economic transformation, which took place over a period of about thirty years since 1979. A profound transformation, which has directly affected the lives of about one fifth of humanity. Indirectly, through international trade, it has had a major influence on the consumption and standard of living of all humanity.

2The book consists of seven chapters. In the first (Surprise), Feng presents the explanandum of his research and the sources of the data. In the second (Origins), he examines the legacies of three decades of socialist regime: the improvement in health and education of the population; the division of the population into two classes by household registration status. The third (Abundance) describes improvements in the population’s standards of living: from diet to home ownership. The fourth (Ascendance) describes two phases of the industrialization process, both due to the initiative of the rural population. The fifth (Two Paths) examines the processes of improvement in standards of living, followed by the two classes of citizens, urban and rural. The sixth (Surplus) and the seventh (Aftermath) are devoted to the problems that have arisen in the last three decades: the ageing population; the expansion of welfare; the high individual and regional income inequalities; government control of education and public debate.

3In the space of about thirty years, China becomes the world’s third largest market, after the US and the EU. Expressed in 2010 dollars, China’s GDP as a percentage of world GDP rises from 1.16% in 1979 to 13.58% in 2019. There is a similar change for GDP per capita. To these traditional measures, Feng prefers to use consumption data: a more precise way of indicating the change in the population’s standard of living. The average annual individual consumption of eggs, for example, rose from 1.32 kg (1970) to 11 kg (2015). Similar changes occurred in the consumption of other everyday foods: from pork and chicken to oil, sugar, vegetables, and fruit.

4This momentous change was not preordained, nor was it foreseen by insiders or outsiders. “A surprise,” Feng calls it. In the words of a famous essay by Robert K. Merton from 1936, it is unanticipated consequences of purposive social actions (“The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review 6, no 1 [1936]: 894–904), carried out in this case by millions of people, primarily residing in rural China.

5According to Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary, the Chinese economic miracle was, along with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, one of the most important economic events of the second millennium. Feng only partly agrees with this assessment and cites Ronald Coase and Ning Wang’s How China Became Capitalist (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Unlike the other two historical events, “capitalism with Chinese characteristics is impoverished by a lack of a free market of ideas” (239).

6What are the main factors that caused or fostered the era of abundance in China? In summary, Feng’s answer to this question is this: it was social forces from below, rather than political institutions, national and local. The economic miracle was produced by a healthy and educated population, mostly living in the countryside, willing to work hard and with low wages, after the end of the disastrous Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. In this direction, it was helped by the decisions of Deng Xiaoping—an authoritative, determined, and highly intelligent political leader.

7I will briefly summarize Feng’s arguments:

8a) China’s rural population offered “good and cheap labour” for about three decades. It was willing to work hard to get out of the misery into which it had been reduced by about three decades of planned economy and the Cultural Revolution. The basis of the economic miracle was therefore young, healthy, educated workers, fervent “believers in personal effort and meritocracy” (207). In support of the latter claim, which is plausible, the author does not present empirical evidence.

9b) Wages were kept low by an institution enacted by the socialist government in 1958: the huji system, also often called hukou. It imposed the registration of every individual as a resident in a certain area of the country—in practice in urban or rural areas. To residents in the former, the government granted social benefits (welfare and education, first and foremost), which were denied to the rural hukou. Two ascriptive classes of citizens were thus differentiated. The rural hukou, precisely because they were segregated and discriminated against, were by reaction the protagonists of economic development. “This deep urban-rural divide” had a great causal weight in limiting the wage demands of the rural hukou. Feng argues that this institution “in addition to the healthy and literate population, provided the two fundamental conditions for Chinese ascendancy to prosperity” (20).

10c) The economic development of the countryside was articulated in three distinct processes, which often overlapped in time: private agricultural production, freed from collective farming, increased dramatically; widespread industrialization in rural areas (initially in light industry, later in engineering) spread like wildfire; and finally, a vast migration from rural areas to the cities took place. The migrants retained their ascribed citizenship status and were therefore exposed to hardship (e.g., for their children’s education) and deprivation. Over time, the number of enterprises established in rural areas (township and village enterprises) grew by leaps and bounds: there were 1.5 million in 1978, 12.2 in 1985, 25 in 1995.

11d) The introduction, not without local and national resistance, of private enterprise and the market marked the abandonment of the socialist economy and the advent of a capitalist system “with Chinese characteristics.” The intervention of politics in the economy was ensured by a large number of state enterprises. They currently produce about a quarter of the nation’s GDP.

12e) The end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was according to Feng a necessary condition of change. After a decade of social and institutional disorder, lack of essential goods, millions of people persecuted and killed, people were “disoriented and disheartened. They wanted change” (209).

13f) A final condition that decisively favored change, initiating and supporting it, was the political action of Deng Xiaoping. He introduced private household farming in the countryside (210); he anticipated and favored rural industry, hence the export of goods and services; he made alliances and won resistance to change. Deng’s political action was, in short, a decisive causal factor in the completion of the Chinese economic miracle.

14In the decade 2010-2019, the forces that produced the age of abundance in China began to weaken until they disappeared, similar to what happened in other countries in the transition from an agricultural to an industrial and post-industrial economy. This happened in the US, Japan, South Korea and European societies. Today, the Chinese age of abundance is over. It has thus become “a subject of history.” The historical circumstances that produced it are unrepeatable. They have been progressively thwarted by opposing forces.

15These headwinds are first and foremost represented by the ageing population, with the consequent decline in the working population. A specifically Chinese phenomenon are the consequences of political birth control—the one-child-per-couple policy—decided in the late 1970s, when female fertility was already declining. It was an improvident measure, which exacerbated the demographic decline and limited family intervention in favor of the elderly—in the presence of progressively rising health and pension costs.

16Negative consequences also result from the existence of ascribed statuses. The Hukou with secondary citizenship working in the cities (about 375 million) have in fact not acquired the status of residents. Their incorporation into a unified citizenship with equal rights will require considerable public expenditure, and political courage.

17Linked to the existence of two citizenships are significant regional inequalities in income and wealth. The Gini index for income has risen from 0.30 (1980) to more than 0.45 (2020); that for wealth has been estimated to range between 0.63 and 0.72. The top 1% of the Chinese owned about one third of the national wealth by the early 2010s, while the poorest 20% of the population owned only 1%. Particularly worrying is the relative poverty of the left behind children, who live with only one parent, grandparents or other relatives. There are about 100 million children, 70% of whom live in rural areas. Many studies have documented negative effects on the cognitive development, health and educational achievements of children raised without one or two parents.

18A final problem concerns national and local politics. Its heavy intervention in the economy, in the first place. Monopolistic public companies are poorly run, compared to private ones. They have little incentive for innovation and undermine the functioning of the market. Feng quotes Milton Friedman in this regard: “the surest way to destroy an industry is to protect it with state monopoly” (234).

19The most significant problem created by the policy on Chinese society is its distrust and closure towards what Feng calls “the market of ideas.” China’s current government places severe limits on the freedom of public debate, first and foremost in schools and universities—in contrast to Deng’s policy, implemented especially in the 1980s. The new Chinese normality means first and foremost maintaining the status quo, i.e. stability through careful control over the population. Preventing free public debate entails significant social and economic costs. These are the ideas that favor endogenous economic growth (Paul M. Romer “The Origins of Endogenous Growth,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no 1 [1994]: 3-22) as it was in the period of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Instead, the obscurantism promoted by Chinese policy hinders public debate and encourages stagnation and decline. This seems to be happening in recent years.

20The Chinese economy is not an open, market economy. Since 2001, its government has not respected the rules and promises it made when it joined the WTO (Stephen Ezell, “False Promises II: The Continuing Gap Between China’s WTO Commitments and Its Practices,” ITIF [2021]: july).

21For instance, it has not respected intellectual property rights and has continued to subsidize domestic companies to favor exports. The same could be said about respect for workers’ rights and the environment. The result is not only the current irrelevance of the WTO, which many are now calling for radical reform, but also the unfair competition to other countries, developed and developing, that those rules have followed. It is difficult to understand the trade war underway in 2025 without reference to these events. It is strange that Feng does not mention this problem, which has been in the public domain for at least a decade now.

22A final remark on method. The aim of Feng’s research is to causally explain China’s economic boom, an articulated and complex historical phenomenon that unfolded over some thirty years. A causal analysis of a historical individual, correctly delimited in its components, requires a series of successive steps. First, the identification and analysis of its possible causal factors; then a counterfactual analysis, a kind of mental experiment. This involves assuming that one of the antecedents considered relevant to the outcome did not occur. The final step is a comparison between the imagined historical process and the one that happened. This makes it possible to conclude that that antecedent was (or was not) one of the causes of the character of the phenomenon under consideration. This is the concept and procedure of adequate historical causation.

23Feng does not seem to follow this path. Instead, he lists several factors that could have slowed or deflected the Chinese economic boom (202–3). Some of them are frankly unlikely: e.g., if China, not Al Qaeda, had been considered the major enemy of the US after 11 September 2001.

24Again. Feng first points to two fundamental conditions that made the Chinese age of abundance possible (ante: point b). He then adds a third “critical historical condition”: the decade in which the Cultural Revolution raged in China. His premise is that “crises arising from wars, pandemics, famines… often serve as historical junctures for major upheavals and transformations of human history” (208). Feng draws from this the conjecture—previously proposed by Deng Xiao Ping in a 1988 interview (210)—that the end of the Cultural Revolution generated in the Chinese population a strong need for change. This seems plausible, even in the absence of empirical evidence in this regard.

25In order to accept that a decade of intense social unrest and institutional anarchy was a decisive causal factor in setting the path to the age of abundance, it would, however, be necessary to argue that in its absence—ceteris paribus—the extraordinary economic process would not have been undertaken. An intellectually arduous undertaking.

26Instead, among the causal events of China’s ascendance, at least in its last period, it would have been useful to consider not only China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, but also its non-compliance with the rules of this international organization. This could open a discussion on the endogenous or exogenous character of China’s extraordinary economic growth.

27In conclusion. Wang Feng’s description and explanation of the Chinese age of abundance contributes to enriching the debate on this era, also thanks to the extensive documentation provided. The volume will be an essential reference point for the study of this event and subsequent historical developments.