ABSTRACT
The Chinese economy has grown spectacularly since the mid-twentieth century. This is partly due to the great transformation that made China (one of) the biggest manufacturing economies in the world, with industry making up no less than 33% of the total economy today. This development is linked to a great many debates. Examples are the Great Divergence debate (why China fell behind Northwestern Europe in terms of per capita income in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), whether Republican China provided the basis for later industrial development, the role of forced industrialization, and the global shift of manufacturing sectors from the West to China.
Given that scholars involved in these debates have repeatedly pointed at the importance of regional clusters of industries, it is remarkable how little attention has been paid to their regional dispersion. This chapter provides a first attempt to analyze regional shifts in industrialization in China over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By combining a list of both published and unpublished sources, we construct industrial employment data by province and prefecture for three benchmark years (1933, 1982, and 2000) for six provinces (Guangdong, Hainan, Guangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shanghai). Unsurprisingly, we find that Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Shanghai were the most industrialized regions in all periods even though their relative importance fluctuated over time. Yet, in terms of sectoral distribution, there was a large difference with the Yangtze provinces dominating in machinery and cotton textiles. These patterns have remained more or less consistent until today.
