Changing Developmental-ness of the State—The Case of China

Abstract

When the notion of the Asian Developmental State is used to examine the development experience of countries in Asia, politics is often not included in the analysis. Perhaps this is because the literature has focused on authoritarian regimes where the dominant party ruled without serious political contenders. It is thus assumed that political dominance by one party that is interested in economic development automatically translates into consistent effort to promote the development agenda. With this assumption, the literature has focused on the study of state structure and capacity as the key variable to explain the success and failure of the developmental state to promote economic development. In this chapter, I would like to problematize this assumption and bring politics back into the notion of developmental state. As we will see in the case of post-reform China, even when the same party rules within the same authoritarian structure, the political will needed to push through the necessary policies waxes and wanes. This explains why supposedly developmental states sometimes do not behave as such. Rather than affixing the label of “developmental state” to regimes with a certain configuration of state structure and capacity and development policies that characterize the regime at one point, I propose conceptualizing the developmental-ness of the state as a variable in order to capture the dynamics of the evolving state—elite relations and factional politics as economic development proceeds.