In this final episode of the Southern Tour podcast, I discuss the reform of the 1980s and early 1990s with Lawrence C. Reardon, author of a new book titled 'A Third Way: The Origins of China’s Current Economic Development Strategy'. Having travelled around the stops of Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour of 1992, this last episode bookends the series with an overview of the era, with some fascinating personal anecdotes from Professor Reardon, who was on the ground in China for much of the 1980s. 

From the blurb: 

From 1949 to 1978, communist elites held clashing visions of China’s economic development. Mao Zedong advocated the “first way” of semi-autarchy characteristic of revolutionary Stalinism (1929–34), while Zhou Enlai adapted bureaucratic Stalinism (1934–53) to promote the “second way” of import substitution industrialization. A Third Way tells the story of Deng Xiaoping’s experimentation with export-led development inspired by Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the economic reforms of Eastern Europe and Asia.

About the author:

Professor Reardon was a Committee for Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China fellow at Peking University from 1984-88, a special researcher at Jinan University (Guangzhou, China) and a foreign expert teaching economics at Shenzhen University (Shenzhen SEZ, China) from 1986-88.  Currently he is an associate professor of political science, coordinator of Asian studies at the University of New Hampshire, as well as an associate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

He has published several monographs on Chinese foreign economic policy, including A Third Way and The Reluctant Dragon: The impact of crisis cycles on Chinese foreign economic policy (University of Washington, 2002).  He also writes on religion and China, and co-edited The Vatican and the Nation-State in Comparative Perspective (Georgetown, 2006).