The Chinese Catching-Up: A Developmentalist Approach

Abstract

:This article aims at understanding the process of Chinese catching-up from a developmentalist theoretical approach. For this purpose, it takes as its starting point the work of some classical authors who inaugurated the debate on the nature of economic development during the 1940s and 1950s—Arthur Lewis, Alexander Gerschenkron, Albert Hirschman, and Raul Prebisch—as a theoretical background aimed at analyzing some key features of China’s multifaceted Chinese catching-up process. The main issues tackled in this article are as follows: structural economic duality and the inter-sectoral transference of labor, the role of the State as the main financing agent and development investor, and unbalanced growth and its linkages effects the challenge of governing and harmonizing the center-periphery relationship.