Death of the East Asian Goose and the Rise of China’s Geoindustrial Policy

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its associated domestic industrial policies represent a parallel trade and investment strategy that challenges the Akamatsu principle of the Flying Geese pattern of industrial development in East Asia. This paper is positioned against the dominant orthodox theory of national systems of industrial development in East Asia. It argues that China’s trade and industry policy in the 2012–2017 period has demonstrated that government will expand its industrial policy market intervention rather than retract, moving away from the regional economic integration order by moving industrial production and import trade away from the Asia-Pacific along a Westward axis to the Indian Ocean and Eurasia. Implications are that the emergence of China’s geoindustrial policy will subvert multilateral trade norms as China begins to institutionalise its external trade and industrial policies.