ABSTRACT
One of the most accepted facts in the research on China's economic development is the importance of local systems. While the need for considering regional or local economies was already manifest in the pre-reform period (Donnithorne 1972; Lyons 1987), the institutionalization of local government authority over the local economy during the 1980s (e.g. Wong 1992; Montinola et al. 1995; Qian 2000) and the observation of divergent regional development patterns in the face of increasing marketization and integration into the world economy (Li and Wei 2010) have reinforced the necessity to approach China from a local perspective. Accordingly, much effort has been invested in analyzing these emergent patterns by focusing on either the political economy or the local organization of industry sectoral activity. Examples of the political economy approach include investigations about differences in local government involvement in rural industrialization (e.g. Hsu 1999; Oi 1999; Chen 2004) — in particular differences between the development model of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province and the Sunan (Southern Jiangsu province) model (Whiting 2001) — as well as different local government attitudes towards the development of specific industries, for example the automotive industry (Thun 2006) or, more generally, high-tech industries (Segal 2003; Sigurdson 2005). Research on China's regional economy, in turn, has illuminated the internal organization and international linkages of local industry agglomerations which have emerged in various regions (e.g. Walcott 2003; Wang and Tong 2005; Zhou et al. 2011).
