Rural Industrialization In China

Small-scale industries in rural areas in China are today an essential element of regional development programs. This monograph analyzes two main development strategies: technology choices in a number of industrial sectors and the integrated rural development strategy.

This book is a comprehensive and positive study of the special pattern of China's industrialization and economic development, covering all of the relevant, main policies (more than one hundred) from 1949 to the twenty-first century.

This collection of papers presented at an international conference in 1987 provides a comprehensive analysis of China's booming rural non-state industrial sector, both collective and private.

"A distinctive and important contribution."—Thomas P. Bernstein, author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages

'The Industrialization of Rural China' highlights the economic & social achievements of the Maoist regime. Using a constructed dataset covering China's 2000 plus counties & complemented by a detailed econometric study of county-level industrialization in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong & Jiangsu, the author shows that history mattered.

This book explores the development of the putting-out system in hand-woven textile industries in late Qing Dynasty and China's Republican Period. In classic sociology theory, the putting-out system in handcraft production was regarded as traditional and inefficient. In the context of Republican China, it was believed that this kind of household-based production system would have totally failed in competition with the factory system of machinery production. However, this book exhibits the historical fact that the putting-out system was booming in handcraft textile production and subsequently provides an explanation to this phenomenon from the perspectives of institutional analysis and quantitative modeling. With rich county-level data and comprehensive analysis, this book is valuable for both researchers, academics and students in economics and social history studies. /remove Sample Chapter(s)Chapter 1: Introduction: Smithian Growth or Involution Growth? /remove

This book analyses China's historical experience of industrialization. It adopts a critical stance towards China's development strategy and proposes an alternative approach, outlining its main features. Due to the great importance and special problems of China's rural modernization, special attention is devoted to analysis of the rural sector. Many of China's rural socio-economic problems are similar to those encountered in other developing countries. It is intended that the book will increase understanding of China's socio-economic development as well as contributing to wider debates in the theory of economic development.

The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.