In recent decades, Kenya has witnessed profound changes in its economic, cultural, and environmental landscapes resulting from its interactions with China. University students are competing for scholarships to study in China, coastal artisanal fishers are increasingly worried about Chinese-owned trawlers depleting fish stocks, fishers on Lake Victoria are grappling with the impact of frozen tilapia from China, and unemployed youth are seeking a fair shot at working on one of Kenya’s multimillion-dollar Chinese-funded infrastructure projects. Anita Plummer’s Kenya’s Engagement with China investigates the tension between official Kenyan and Chinese state narratives and individual Kenyans’ reactions to China’s presence to provide insight into how everyday Kenyans exercise their political agency. The competing discourses Plummer uncovers in person, in the news, and online reveal how Kenyans use China to question local power structures, demand policy change, and articulate different visions for their country’s future. This critical text represents the next step in research on Sino-African relations.

South Korea has been held out as an economic miracle—as a country that successfully completed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status—and as an example of how a middle-income country can continue to move up the technology ladder into the production and export of more sophisticated goods and services. But with these successes have come challenges, among them poverty, inequality, long work hours, financial instability, and complaints about the economic and political power of the country’s large corporate conglomerates, or chaebol.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Successive chapters analyze the Korean experience from the perspectives of political economy, the growth record, industrial organization and corporate governance, financial development and instability, labor and employment, inequality and social policy, and Korea’s place in the world economy. A concluding chapter describes the country’s economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met. The volume also serves to summarize the findings of companion volumes in the Harvard–Korean Development Institute series on the Korean economy, also published by the Harvard University Asia Center.

How do poor nations become rich, industrialized, and democratic? And what role does democracy play in this transition? To address these questions, Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast study South Korea’s remarkable transformation since 1960. The authors concentrate on three critical turning points: Park Chung Hee’s creation of the development state beginning in the early 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the genesis of and reaction to the 1997 economic crisis. At each turning point, Korea took a significant step toward creating an open access social order.

The dynamics of this transition hinge on the inclusion of a wide array of citizens, rather than just a narrow elite, in economic and political activities and organizations. The political economy systems that followed each of the first two turning points lacked balance in the degree of political and economic openness and did not last. The Korean experience, therefore, suggests that a society lacking balance cannot sustain development. Korean Political and Economic Development offers a new view of how Korea was able to maintain a pro-development state with sustained growth by resolving repeated crises in favor of rebalancing and greater political and economic openness.