The Reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy

Chinese foreign economic policy before 1978 has been considered isolationist and centered on Maoist self-reliance, but in The Reluctant Dragon, Lawrence Reardon relies on primary sources, including Chinese Communist Party histories and other restricted-circulation materials to show that China's apparently sudden turn outward in 1978 was actually an extension of previous experiments hobbled by bureaucratic infighting and conflict among rival elites.

Lawrence C. Reardon is associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.

"Far and away the most comprehensive and detailed account of China's foreign economic policy making. . . . The range of primary source materials discovered and used in this study is truly incredible." -Nicholas R. Lardy, Peterson Institute for International Economics