Uncover the radical central planning, dramatic upheavals, and transformative socialist policies that redefined China from the revolution to the reform era.
Between 1949 and 1978 China built a command economy and dismantled the mechanisms a market uses, one at a time, in a documented order. That makes the period an unusually clean test of what the first course argued in the abstract.
The hour opens in 1958 with a steel campaign that ran from thirty thousand backyard furnaces in July to ninety million people by December, producing metal no factory could use. Was it allocatively efficient. Would a market have done it. Both wait for the framework. That framework is the four changes phased in by 1956, treated not as four policies but as the removal of every mechanism a market uses to correct itself. Prices carry instructions instead of measuring scarcity. Quotas reward tonnage, then corrupt the information they rest on. Exit closes on both sides of the labor market. Land title goes to three hundred million peasants in 1950 and is taken back by 1956.
The centre is the famine of 1959 to 1961. Output fell about fifteen percent, for reasons the hour sets out, and that is not the explanation. Available food went from just over twenty-one hundred calories a day in 1957 to about fifteen hundred by 1960, serious hunger but not a level at which tens of millions die. Quotas were fixed in advance from expected output, so the share taken rose as harvests fell and the biggest growers surrendered the most exactly when their own crops failed. Famine severity rose with food production per person. The most productive regions died worst.
The close runs from the retreat of 1961 to the drift of the 1970s and ends on the investment record, where an eight percent average conceals swings from plus fifty-four to minus fifty-two and every turning point carries the name of a political campaign rather than an economic change. The failure is structural, not moral. Every mechanism would have run the same way with entirely decent people in every chair, and the comparison is never markets against an ideal government but imperfect markets against imperfect governments.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
TARGET AUDIENCE
CPAs, lawyers, financial advisors, analysts, managers and business owners. The hour is economic reasoning worked through a fully documented case, so it suits anyone whose job involves forecasting when prices are set by policy rather than scarcity, reading figures produced by people whose targets depend on them, or judging how a rule changes behaviour once the people under it start responding to it. No background in Chinese history is assumed and none is needed.
Associate Professor of Economics | King's University College at Western
Dr. Jason Dean Economics Professor and Applied Economist Dr. Jason Dean is an Associate Professor of Economics at King’s University College at Western University. He teaches economics to university students and working professionals, drawing on experience in academic research, economic consulting and public policy. His CPD courses explain how changes in inflation, interest rates and employment affect businesses and their clients. Jason works through the reasoning behind these relationships so learners can interpret economic news, question forecasts and understand the assumptions behind a policy recommendation. Before joining King’s, Jason worked as an associate and health economist at Analysis Group and as an economic research analyst at CEP News. His consulting work contributed to published studies of healthcare costs and treatment outcomes. He has also taught economics to CPA students at Sheridan College. Jason’s teaching career has taken him across Canada, Japan and China. In 2024, he was a visiting professor in Canadian Studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, where he taught Canadian Business Culture and Canadian Economic History. He taught Labour Economics at Wuhan University of Technology and Labour Economics and International Trade and Finance at Renmin University in Beijing. His experience teaching in China prompted him to develop his Economics of China course at King’s. His Canadian teaching experience also includes Wilfrid Laurier University, McMaster University Continuing Education and McGill University. Beyond the classroom, Jason has delivered presentations on practical uses of artificial intelligence for Haver Analytics, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Toronto Association for Business and Economics. His topics have included economists’ productivity, copyright and privacy. He has contributed assessment questions and digital learning activities to economics teaching materials for McGraw-Hill and Pearson. His research examines questions with consequences for households and employers: What happens when immigrants cannot find work related to their education? How does a fall in income affect a renter’s ability to move? Do Canadian housing and stock markets share a long-run relationship? His work has appeared in journals including Applied Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Cliometrica and the Journal of Housing Economics. As an associate researcher with the Montreal Economic Institute, Jason studies how taxes and benefit reductions affect the financial return to work. His policy publications address the circumstances of low-income seniors, people taking a second job and workers moving off income assistance. He has provided media commentary on housing, labour markets and the Canadian economy. Jason holds a PhD in Economics from McGill University, an MA in Economics from the University of Guelph and an Honours BBA from Wilfrid Laurier University. MONTREAL ECONOMIC INSTITUTE — RESEARCH REPORTS • “End Penalties That Punish Low-Income Seniors Who Work” (2026), with the collaboration of Gabriel Giguère. • “The Benefits of Eliminating the Middle-Income Tax Bracket” (2025), with the collaboration of Emmanuelle B. Faubert. • “Full-Time Struggle and Two-Job Juggle: A Tax Holiday for Canadians to Fight Rising Costs” (2024), with the collaboration of Renaud Brossard. • “Canada’s Welfare Wall: Enhancing the CWB for Full-Time Employment” (2023), with the collaboration of Renaud Brossard. • “Labour Shortages: Helping a Trapped Pool of Potential Workers Help Themselves” (2023), with the collaboration of Célia Pinto Moreira. POLICY COMMENTARY • “It’s time to give the middle class a real tax break.” The Hamilton Spectator, March 17, 2025. • “Hey Ottawa, workers with two jobs could use a break.” The Hamilton Spectator, January 13, 2024. • “Workers Benefit not working for workers.” Financial Post, May 4, 2023. PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH — ECONOMICS • Dilmaghani, M., and Dean, J. “Sexual orientation and intra-household specialization before and after the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in Canada.” Applied Economics, 56(29), 3460–3484 (2024). • Singh, A., McFarlane, A., Dean, J., and Erenburg, G. “Are Canadian Residential Real Estate and Stock Markets Segmented or Integrated?” Empirical Economics Letters, 23(7) (2024). • Dean, J., and Steele, M. “Income decline, financial insecurity, landlord screening and renter mobility.” Regional Science and Urban Economics, 95, 103797 (2022). • Dean, J., and Geloso, V. “The linguistic wage gap in Quebec, 1901 to 1951.” Cliometrica, 16, 615–637 (2022). • Dilmaghani, M., and Dean, J. “Sexual orientation and homeownership in Canada.” Journal of Housing Economics, 49, 101688 (2020). • Dean, J. “Does it matter if immigrants work in jobs related to their education?” IZA Journal of Development and Migration, 8, Article 7 (2018). • Dilmaghani, M., and Dean, J. “Labor Market Attainment of Canadian Jews During the First Two Decades of the 20th Century.” Contemporary Jewry, 38, 49–77 (2018). • Dean, J., and Dilmaghani, M. “Economic Integration of Pre-WWI Immigrants from the British Isles in the Canadian Labour Market.” Journal of International Migration and Integration, 17(1), 55–76 (2016). • Dilmaghani, M., and Dean, J. “Religiosity and female labour market attainment in Canada: the Protestant exception.” International Journal of Social Economics, 43(3), 244–262 (2016). COAUTHORED RESEARCH — HEALTH ECONOMICS AND OUTCOMES • “Systematic review of long-acting injectables versus oral atypical antipsychotics on hospitalization in schizophrenia.” Current Medical Research and Opinion, 30(8), 1643–1655 (2014). • “Burden of schizophrenia on selected comorbidity costs.” Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, 14(2), 259–267 (2014). • “Impact of omalizumab on emergency-department visits, hospitalizations, and corticosteroid use among patients with uncontrolled asthma.” Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, 109(1), 59–64 (2012). OTHER RESEARCH REPORTS • Dean, J., and Dilmaghani, M. “Religious Diversity and Labour Market Attainment: Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, 1911–2011.” Atlantic Research Group on Economics of Immigration, Aging and Diversity (2015).
