The main purpose of this book is to apply the basic tools of economic analysis to the economy of the Peoples' Republic of China. It is written for students of economics who would like to understand China, for students of China who would like to understand economics, and for professional economists and lay readers who would like to understand the Chinese economy.The study of the Chinese economy is interesting to economists for several reasons. First, China has a different cultural background and a different set of social and political institutions from the Western countries, in which most of the tools of economic analysis have been developed. It is therefore interesting to see how these tools can be applied to China and how they ought to be further developed or modified in the Chinese context. Second, many drastic changes in economic policy and economic institutions have taken place since the founding of the People's Republic of China. Such important experiments in economics provide rare opportunities to study their results. Third, since the later 1970s much more information on the Chinese economy has become available. It is time for us to digest, to scrutinize, and possibly to help improve the economic data on China.
