Dragons with Clay Feet?

Transition has brought about considerable environmental degradation in the rural countryside, with rural resources such as land, forests, and water suffering at the expense of these transitions. This book takes up the challenge to examine what the impacts have been of these transformations for farmers in China and Vietnam. The authors as a whole investigate rural inequality and a range of farm decision-making processes through a predominantly economic lens. In sum, the twenty-eight authors involved—and it is positive to note that many are from China or Vietnam—through their sixteen chapters, bring to light new, in-depth case studies and analyses on agricultural diversification, production growth, urban encroachment, and the widespread use of agro-chemicals. * Development and Change, March 2009 *
Dragons with Clay Feet is a book that all scholars of development and transition will want to read. Combining work from some of the best researchers working on China and Vietnam in the world, there are papers that document the miracles of East Asia's transition and others that identify and analyze the region's most critical developmental and environmental challenges. The editors, Max Spoor, Nico Heerink, and Qu Futian, have put together a volume that is ambitious in its scope, careful in its scholarship, and bold in its conclusions. -- Scott Rozelle, Stanford University