This book is part of a series which makes available to English-speaking audiences the work of the individual Chinese economists who were the architects of China's economic reform. The series provides an inside view of China's economic reform, revealing the thinking of the reformers themselves, unlike many other books on China's economic reform which are written by outside observers.

Zhou Xiaochuan (1948-) has been Governor of the People's Bank of China since 2002 and is one of the most influential economists in the world. He holds numerous other important positions, including Governor of the International Monetary Fund for China and Vice-Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Before his important work as a banker, he was in the 1980s a major contributor to the process of analysing policies to do with the structural reform of the Chinese economy.

The book is published in association with China Development Research Foundation, one of the leading economic and social think tanks in China, where many of the theoretical foundations and policy details of economic reform were formulated.