Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT East Asian developmentalism is often depicted as a derivative ideology with its origins in the diffusion of Western thought to the region, first to Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration and then to the rest of the region in the twentieth century following the Japanese example. Recent scholarship has challenged that perspective by highlighting important endogenous roots of the developmentalist ideology of Meiji Japan. This paper shows that Chinese developmentalism also has deep local origins in China’s own intellectual history that long predated the importation of Western (and Japanese) political economy to the country in the early twentieth century. It also demonstrates that locally-originated Chinese developmentalist ideology diffused beyond China’s borders in ways that influenced the emergence of ‘developmental mindsets’ elsewhere in the East Asia region in the nineteenth century, including in Meiji Japan. Rather than being a laggard in the regional embrace of developmentalist ideology diffusing from the West, China was a key source and exporter of this ideology to the region. For these reasons, Chinese thinkers deserve a more prominent place in histories of the origins of East Asian developmentalism, and of developmentalist thought in general.