Changing Patterns of Industrialization and Emerging States in Twentieth Century China

Abstract

After the middle of the 19th century, China started to struggle for industrial development and eventually achieved it. This chapter proposes to discuss the process of China’s industrialization by distinguishing it into four periods, including the relatively short but critical period of wartime controlled economy, and by referring to the relative weights of three factors that have shaped the economic development of modern China, the global economy, private enterprises, and the government. Such an understanding will help us to situate Mao’s era in the whole process of China’s industrialization. We will also make it clear that China had developed two types of industrialization, capital-intensive industrialization and labour-intensive industrialization, and suggests that the wartime controlled economy under the Nationalist government played a particularly important role in this process.