A Sub-Provincial Recipe of Coastal Development in China: The Case of Qingdao

Abstract

No monocausal explanation will suffice to account for the complex process of economic development. At different times and under different politico-economic circumstances, different combinations of actors and institutions are involved as agents of development, which include factories, investment banks, entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, foreign capital and the state. When “telescoping” the arduous process of development is the key imperative, the role of the state becomes particularly crucial in designing overall development strategies, governing the market by getting the prices wrong, and controlling the major sources of financing development. It should be noted, however, that the state is a multi-layered structure of authority with its own intra- and inter-governmental dynamics. As the extensive literature on the East Asian Newly Industrializing Economies (NIEs) almost uniformly adopts the highly encompassing term of state, it largely fails to differentiate the roles performed by the central and local governments in executing “developmental intervention.”