This is an original, insightful and ground-shifting work by a well-established scholar in the field of Chinese economic history. Despite its catchy title which unapologetically links an economic revolution in China to rural entrepreneurship, it is by no means a work of the “last-minute rush” for fishing a moment of fame or for fulfilling a due academic assessment. Rather, this is a result of the author's decade-long painstaking hands-on research in North China. With her “slow cooking” approach, the author is able to bring out all the nuances of the subject for a true intellectual feast.

The study is based on a densely populated rural region, Gaoyang County in Hebei Province, between Beijing/Tianjin and Shijiazhuang. The sample includes around 100 villages, large enough to validate its representativeness for the lower reaches of the Yellow River Valley. This region is conventionally considered to be an economic hinterland, traditional, conservative, and subsistent, contrasting to the ever-bubbly Yangtze Valley in the south (à la the view of the California School). But the author has changed the stereotype with one stoke.

The book has a coherent theme of what is called the “Gaoyang Model” across its nine chapters to show how Chinese rural grassroots entrepreneurship in the textile production and marketing has developed and fared over about a century when the production factors and market conditions have been constantly changing.

Three periods are identified: (1) the early period of favorable environment for rural grassroots entrepreneurship under a laissez-faire state and a laissez-faire market until the mid-1930s (the period of growth and development); (2) brutal shocks to the rural economy from the Japanese invasion, occupation and rent-seeking after 1937 which was then followed by the anti-market and anti-material mentality and policy of Mao in the 1950s throughout the 1970s (the period of turmoil); and (3) the revival of the rural grassroots entrepreneurship after Deng Xiaoping's reforms (the period of the market renaissance). The author has successfully established a pattern, and demonstrated how that pattern has evolved, and above all, what the differences such a pattern has made in ordinary people's material life (i.e., employment, investment, production, income, and consumption).

The thrust of this study lies in its positivism. Taking nothing for granted, the author has vigorously proved that Gaoyang has a fully functional private ownership-based market economy to dictate local choices in capital investment, technology change, labor input, imports, and exports. With it, both Smithian growth and Schumpeterian growth have occurred instantaneously and simultaneously. As a result, in the Gaoyang region an economic dualism has clearly operated with which the importance of farming for food has declined (apart from the Maoist era) and become a mere by-employment. Industrial production and services (textile wholesale and retail) have emerged as the main occupation and income source for a large proportion of the locals. The alleged landlordism, western imperialism, world market volatility (prior to 1937), and government rent-seeking (after 1949) did not stop the Smithian-Schumpeterian mechanisms. Any attempts to reverse this structural change was only costly and counterproductive (e.g., under the Japanese colonial control and Maoist farming fundamentalism).

The essence of the “Gaoyang Model” itself is the non-state-led growth. The book shows that in private hands it was easy for the Gaoyang industry and services to recover from wars but to come to from Maoism was much harder. During the post-Mao era, the Gaoyang industry and services has grown faster when and where the state interferes less. One cannot help speculating what Gaoyang—and indeed the entire rural China—would look like today without the damages caused by the Japanese invasion and Maoism. In this regard, the author sheds fresh light on the true prime mover of modern growth and development in East Asia which has long been pigeonholed as “Gerschkronian” with heavy manipulation by the state, a view that is now facing a serious challenge from this book.

On the political level, civil society once ran its natural course (prior to 1937) in Gaoyang just as it did in Western Europe when industrialization took its roots. The crime of Maoism has been the total destruction of such civil society. Even so, despite political and ideological distortions, the market has still thrived and economic dualism accelerated after 1978.

One of the most significant findings of this book is Gaoyang workers' total indifference towards the Communism Movement right from the beginning in the 1930s and the easy and their smooth conversion back to the market economy after 1978. Clearly, what truly matters to the ordinary Chinese has been their mundane livelihood: jobs, wages, and investment returns. So, for the past century, the most damaging factor to the Gaoyang industrialization, or industrialization anywhere in China, has to be Maoism which has no Chinese characteristics what so ever. This book shows why and how Maoism was doomed in China on the grassroots level.

Last but not the least, the author has made this book reader friendly. Jargon of economics and economic history has been kept minimal and there is no showing off of quantitative novelty of any sort. It still does the job to convey all the messages from the author.

A masterpiece of scholarship, this book will leave its permanent mark in the study of Chinese economic history.