ABSTRACT
The Far East is the showpiece of successful development, experiencing both the fastest and the least expected growth. In 1950 Japan had barely begun to emerge from wartime devastation. Most Japanese then still doubted that their country would ever regain the pre-war economic levels. For twenty years, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, China stagnated economically and actually lost ground. Then, after the Cultural Revolution collapsed into chaos, the peasantry was given a little freedom to grow crops and to sell them on the market. The 'economic development' that was the great discovery of the 1950s was to be universal and across the board. The 1950s and 1960s believed they had discovered economic development because they had new theories and new policies. The policies that did work in the last forty years were very different from those that development economists and development politicians advocated.
