ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a theoretical framework for successful industrialization that includes both foreign and domestic factors. The several alternate theoretical approaches to China’s history of industrialization have different major premises. The major premise of the domestic-limitation approach is that westernization must precede industrialization. The major premise of the foreign-intervention approach is that successful industrialization requires a high level of sovereignty. The foreign-intervention approach argues that because the international environment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by aggressiveness, China needed a high level of sovereignty in order to industrialize. Domestic-limitation theorists argue that Confucianism and traditional Chinese society inhibited industrialization, and that Chinese institutions had to be replaced with westernized ones before China could industrialize. One opportunity that foreign intervention created for non-Western industrialization was that it stimulated defensive modernization efforts. Most large European countries experienced low levels of foreign intervention and industrialized because they possessed adequate military and economic capabilities.
