Bryan Cheang’s Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State is a timely and intellectually daring book that enters the long-standing debate over the East Asian economic miracle with clarity, rigor, and a revisionist sensibility.

In most debates over what caused any historical event to occur, the disputants tend to emphasize what they consider to be the most important causal factor, and minimize the influence of factors they consider to be less important. It is not so much that they dispute the relevance of contested factors in understanding the event comprehensively, but more that there is no agreement on the degree of importance that ought to be attached to those factors.