◆ Book Ontology
One book, taken apart and mapped: its claims, its lineage, its hinges, its afterlife.

Each card boils a single work down to a one-page anatomy — the payload it argues, the citations it builds on and fights, the hinges where it stands or falls, and where it sits among its neighbors. Cards sharing citation ancestry merge into clusters.

Cluster

What Is a Technological Revolution?  →

The bursts of technology that reorganize the economy since ~1770, and what each theorist makes the unit, the driver, and the time-shape

theorem
Technological Revolutions and Financial CapitalThe Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Perez · Edward Elgar, 2002
Capitalism assimilates each technological revolution through a recurring half-century sequence: revolution, bubble, collapse, golden age, unrest.
 panorama
Creating the Twentieth CenturyTechnical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact
by Vaclav Smil · Oxford University Press, 2005
The two pre-WWI generations (1867-1914) invented the fundamentals of the modern world: the greatest technical discontinuity in history, which the 20th century then improved and diffused rather than surpassed.
 theorem
Technology and the Rise of Great PowersHow Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition
by Jeffrey Ding · Princeton University Press, 2024
Great-power transitions are driven by capacity to diffuse general-purpose technologies across the whole economy, not by monopolizing innovation in leading sectors; the binding constraint is skill infrastructure.
Cluster

Where Did China's Reform Knowledge Come From?  →

The sources of China's reform-era economic-policy knowledge, 1976-1993

narrative
Dilemmas of Reform in ChinaPolitical Conflict and Economic Debate
by Joseph Fewsmith · M.E. Sharpe, 1994
China's 1980s economic reform was made through elite political conflict: policy emerged from the contest between competing opinion groups (Chen Yun's readjusters, the ideologues, Zhao's reformers and their young economists), fought out in the Party's own press and ending with the fall of the Zhaoist era.
 theorem
How China Escaped Shock TherapyThe Market Reform Debate
by Isabella M. Weber · Routledge, 2021
China escaped shock therapy because gradualist marketization from the margins defeated wholesale price liberalization in a fierce 1980s debate, on intellectual grounds rooted in China's statecraft tradition of price stabilization.
 narrative
Unlikely PartnersChinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China
by Julian Gewirtz · Harvard University Press, 2017
China's market reforms were shaped by a sustained, deliberate partnership between Chinese reformers and Western and East European economists, a transnational exchange the Party's official history now erases.
 theorem
The Rise of Industrial Policy in China, 1978-2012Harvard-Yenching Institute Working Paper
by Sebastian Heilmann and Lea Shih · Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2013
China's industrial policy was a deliberate import of Japan's high-growth-era template, carried by an identifiable advocacy coalition (Ma Hong's network) from 1979 onward, institutionalized in stages and generalized economy-wide after 2004.
 constellation
The International Sources of Chinese State CapitalismLeutert's corpus on the Japanese and Singaporean sources of China's reform (2021-2025), with Sarah Eaton's complementary work noted
by Wendy Leutert · Springer / China Quarterly / New Political Economy / Asian Survey / Cambridge UP, 2025
China's reform-era economy was shaped substantially by foreign models, above all Japan's, absorbed through advisers, exchanges, and the study of examples, and recombined selectively ('policy collaging') rather than diffused one-way.
 constellation
Japan and China's Reform, in Vogel's Two BooksThe Japan channel as documented in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011) and China and Japan: Facing History (2019)
by Ezra F. Vogel · Harvard University Press (Belknap), 2019
Japan was the foremost foreign contributor to China's reform-era modernization, not only materially (loans, technicians, Baoshan) but through a formalized, decades-long advisory channel; the Chinese themselves judged Japan's development-guidance model more appropriate for China than the West's.