ABSTRACT
While this study focuses on China’s national team, at the broadest possible level the issues explored in this book relate directly to the overall question of how we think about economic development. In fact, the impetus to study China’s large groups, as noted, was initially prompted by the debates on South Korean and Japanese industrial policy that have figured prominently in the development economics literature in recent years. These debates have seen the field of development economics and related policy split between two competing paradigms. Unsurprisingly, they have had a considerable influence on development thinking. Broadly speaking, two ‘competing paradigms of development’, known as the orthodox school and the heterodox (or revisionist) school have guided development thinking and policy in recent years.1 In certain crucial respects these two schools hold very different views on the processes of economic development, with important implications for the research agenda, as well as leading to divergent views on policy. Unsurprisingly, the proponents of these diverging paradigms have clashed along a number of well-documented battlefronts, leading to a split in the development field. Three particular battlefronts stand out as being of major significance, corresponding to three major economic, social and political events in our recent history. These include the debate surrounding the ‘East Asian miracle’ and the reasons for the successes and failures of Japanese and South Korean late industrialization in the post-war period (see, for example, World Bank 1993; Amsden 1989); the transition and reform of centrally planned economic systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (Nolan 1995); and more recently, the Asian financial crisis.
