ABSTRACT
The adoption of different economic development strategies has important political implications. As I have shown in chapter 2, while the Maoist development strategy was heavily redistributive and interior-oriented, the Dengist development strategy has been biased in favor of the coastal region. Indeed, under the postMao reforms, even if the interior had been granted the same preferential policies as the coastal region, owing to variations in regional conditions, the interior would not have fared as well as the coastal region without the visible hand of the center. The central government had assumed that growth along the coast would diffuse into the rest of the country. But as years passed by, nagging questions began to be asked about how soon and to what extent the trickle-down process would occur.
