How China Escaped the Poverty Trap is an innovative account to explain why China has economically developed in spite - or because - of its low-quality institutions. It is both a theoretically original and empirically rich study of Chinese economic development and required reading for those who want to understand China's and our own future.

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap... is an original and insightful take on what is perhaps the biggest development puzzle of my lifetime.

Ang provides specialists and nonspecialists alike with a fresh inside-the-black-box account of how the Chinese state... has actually practiced (not merely preached) innovation, problem solving, and effective implementation.... Future studies of bureaucratic life in China and elsewhere must reckon seriously with Ang's account.

As if explaining modern Chinese economic development was not enough of a challenge, Ang has two even loftier goals. The first is methodological. She expresses a frustration with political science's causality obsession and modeling approaches that deliver isolated snapshots of complex processes.... Ang's second ambition is to apply this coevolutionary schema to how we understand economic development generally.

China's transformation cannot be attributed to a single cause; rather, it arose from a contingent, interactive process--Ang calls it 'directed improvisation.' She formalizes this insight which has the potential to influence future studies of institutional and economic change beyond China.

The author has certainly filled the gaps in the literature on the political-economic analysis of China's historic transformation from a low-income to a middle-income country through adoption of a co-evolutionary approach to development. Overall, this interesting book goes deeper beneath the broad political-economic surface of Chinese society. It should appeal not only to researchers on Chinese society, but also to practising political economists.

The book combines methodological rigour, employing a complexity perspective hitherto unknown in standard political economy analyses... with rich original empirical data drawn from more than 400 interviews.... This is an important book with a bold thesis that, at its most ambitious, demands a rethinking of the history and evolution of capitalism.... In terms of policy implications, Ang's thesis has the potential to upend much that the global development establishment holds dear.

This book is a triumph, opening a window onto the political economy of China's astonishing rise that takes as its starting point systems and complexity. Its lessons apply far beyond China's borders.

This book is an invaluable addition to the scholarship on the political economy of development.

While adaptive approaches to development have become new buzzwords, Yuen Yuen's work brings rigor to this conversation.... This analytical lens has enormous potential for thinking through the adaptive challenge, whether at the national level, subnational level or sectoral level.