"Through eight empirical studies, this volume explores the interplay between institutional change and economic performance in a constructed model of the treaty port economy in late-Qing and Republican China"--Provided by publisher

Why did it take China more than a century after its defeat in the first Opium War to begin systematically acquiring the fruits of modern technology? To what extent did the rapid economic developments after 1949 depend on features unique to China and to Chinese history as well as on the socialist...