The Treaty Port Economy in Modern China

“Where previous generations of researchers sought to account for China's failures, we now face the novel problem of explaining massive success. This volume offers a timely reappraisal of circumstances in China's treaty ports, one of many legacies underpinning today's economic boom. The emphasis on institutions, a topic that recent studies tend to sidestep, adds to the value of the lively empirical studies of this new book."—Thomas G. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh

"These studies of institutional changes in China's treaty port economies introduce the challenges and potential payoffs of understanding how institutions affect economic performance. With rich and diverse empirircal material, they provide perspective on more recent Chinese economic reforms and the ways in which economic growth need neither intend nor result in prosperity for all."—R. Bin Wong, University of California, Los Angeles

"The edited volume under review here is one of the most important to have been published on China's pre-war economy in recent years. Readers wary of this genre will be pleasantly surprised, since this compilation of studies penned by different scholars is a far cry from the all-too-common re-hashed conference proceedings. Rather, as the title suggests, the volume integrates much newly mined empirical evidence with intelligent analyses, and features numerous mutually-complementary insights into hitherto neglected aspects of the Treaty Port microcosm." —Niv Horesh, University of Western Sydney and University of Nottingham, International Journal of Asian Studies