ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the genesis of Jiangsu province’s outward investment trajectory. It argues that Jiangsu’s outward investment emerged in line with a conducive economic structure in the southern part of the province and with the aid of provincial and municipal government guidance. Jiangsu’s provincial government captured the central government’s investment frameworks and incited a path-dependent process: it tailored its own economic development interests to those of the central government and provided policy and service support to domestic enterprises in enhancing pre-existing patterns. This chapter’s focus on the pre-reform period presents how investment patterns can be linked to economic structures of a manufacturing basis in southern Jiangsu, and to the region’s provincial history of large enterprises, with some existing since Republican China and persisting throughout the Mao era. The second part of the chapter shows how provincial and municipal governments during the reform and opening period actively attracted inward investment and thereby developed a conducive environment for provincial enterprises to build early international ties. The third section delineates how provincial and municipal governments became increasingly involved in governing Jiangsu’s outward investment after the introduction of the “Go Global” Strategy.
