The recent turmoil in the stock market and the ongoing growth slowdown does not lessen the importance of China’s economic growth as one of most remarkable episodes of economic history. The rise of China has received much less attention from macroeconomists than it deserves.1 Moreover, most academic studies of China’s success story start with the 1978 reforms. Mao’s era is either omitted or mentioned only in the context of the disaster of the Great Leap Forward and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.2 This is unfortunate, as the pre-1978 period was not only one of the largest economic policy experiments and ... (full story)