Roselyn Hsueh has written a very good book about the transformation of the Chinese economy in the decade since the country's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is a solid piece of work, and it will be of interest scholars of the Chinese economy as well as policy makers who are interested in China's growing role in the global economy.

On one level, this is the kind of study I admire the most. In an era in which social scientists chase datasets that have become available as China has opened up – datasets that allow for fancy econometrics but deliver little in the way of “thick description” – analyses get fancier and fancier, yet we seem to know less and less about the phenomena we are observing. The result is that we are producing an army of young scholars who can opine on the regression coefficients of the impact of ownership structure or industry location on EBITA, yet many of them know little of the intricacies of what ownership and industry actually mean in the Chinese context. In the current academic environment, Roselyn Hsueh is a welcome throwback: with boots on the ground, she has designed an industry-level comparative study, gone out into the field, done in-depth interviews with key industry players, and come up with some perspectives that significantly advance the conversation about what is happening in China's transition from lethargic state-owned socialist economy to world beating economy juggernaut. It's good stuff.

Hsueh deftly argues that China's transition from plan to market, especially in the decade following the country's accession to the WTO in 2001, has been an interesting balancing act between state control in the global economic system and a decentralization of power that allowed provincial and municipal level governments to exercise control over industrial sectors. She has chosen two sectors to illuminate her analysis – textiles and telecommunications – and she shows that the theoretical framework she is building differs across sectors, driving home the point that China's transition is an incredibly complex process. Understanding this process requires a deep inspection of the tension between global pressures, some level of centralized control, and the competitive dynamism that comes from decentralization. It is a nice argument – built on a good empirical study – and it rings true to my understanding of how China's reforms are unfolding.

I do have a couple of reservations about the book, which relate to strange omissions and mischaracterizations. First, on a macro level, the story told about this balancing act is missing a key player: Zhu Rongji and the institutions he created. Zhu is mentioned a few times in the book, and the author might contend that the era she is writing about is actually the post-Zhu era. But for a book about state-led development and the balance between centralized control and local industrial initiative, it is difficult to imagine a figure that has been more important in this process than Zhu. So much of what was set in motion during the era that Hsueh writes about was defined by the vision of Zhu Rongji's tenure as Premier the decade before. Take, for example, the emergence of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC, “guoziwei”), which officially came into being in the twilight of Premier Zhu's political career. This is one of the most important institutional developments in the governance of China's key industrial sectors in the last 20 years. SASAC is the organization that has struck the balance between centralization of policy and cross-industry coordination and strategy on the one hand, and local industry innovation on the other (the key point that Hsueh is writing about). But there is no mention of SASAC in the book and only a few references to Zhu Rongji.

Second, in certain aspects of organizational-level analysis, the book is strangely silent as well: while telecommunications is one of the chosen case studies, the work is heavily weighted toward telecommunication networks and mobile technology, with very little attention given to telecommunications infrastructure. Hsueh clearly understands the intricacies of mobile technology and all of the debates that raged in the 1990s and 2000s about CDMA versus GSM standards. Companies like China Unicom and China Telecom get plenty of attention and are obviously well understood. But this is only half the industry, the other half being the infrastructure side – switching technology, network backbone, and the like. Important companies like Huawei and ZTE do not seem to be well understood by Hsueh. For example the author writes “In 2006, attempting to push the [WAPI] standard via market means rather than state mandate, the state-owned carriers, Huawei, Lenovo, Haier, and fifteen other domestic companies, with ministerial-level guidance, established the WAPI Industrial Union” (p. 113). Elsewhere, quoting Anne Stevenson-Yang, Hsueh says of Huawei “Whether you call state or private, Huawei is a fascinating example of the adaptability of the Chinese corporate model…” (p. 81). I cannot begin to understand what to make of these statements or numerous others throughout the book. Calling Huawei state-owned is superficial and downright incorrect, and while many political publications in Washington misrepresent the company's ownership structure, it is strange that a China scholar whose work is on the telecommunications industry would make such a mistake. Huawei is a private company that has not gone through an IPO process because of China's strange Securities Law (the rule in China is that if a firm is to be publicly listed, no more than 200 employees can own shares; currently, more than 61,000 of Huawei's 110,000 employees own shares in the company.) And it is extremely strange to refer to Lenovo as state-owned; while the Chinese Academy of Sciences owns about one third of the company, its history bears little resemblance to the state sector. Same goes for Haier. The book is littered with superficial throwaway lines like this. Here again, it might be the case that the author would claim that that this is not her central issue, but for a book that is based on sectoral analysis of the telecommunications industry, I would expect a little more.

Nevertheless, these issues only detract modestly from the important discussions that are raised by this book. And there is a lot to be learned here when you get beyond the superficialities. On the whole, I recommend this book enthusiastically.