Developing China's West: A Critical Path to Balanced National Development (review)

This book is one of a series of studies that have been published since 1978 on the emerging regions of China, a project overseen by Yue-man Yeung, the present Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Asia Pacific Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Previous studies have focused on the dynamic coastal regions such as Guangdong, Shanghai, and Fujian. One of the features of these studies is that they have been able to include contributions from many mainland Chinese researchers in conjunction with some of the better-known scholars of China who carry out their research from Hong Kong and other parts of the world. Thus, these studies have played a significant role in "opening up" the research on China done by Chinese academics to nonspecialist readers who do not have Chinese-language skills. These volumes approach the study of China from the perspective of the "geography of development," focusing on the spatial results of China's development policies. The present volume differs from the previous ones in that it has a macro-regional focus on one of the three major economic "belts" (West, Central, and East), based on the "ladder-step" doctrine developed in the 1980s.¹ This policy approach recognized that each of these regions had its own factor endowments or comparative advantages, which were greatly influenced by the growth-pole theory that drove Chinese economic policy under Deng when various preferential policies were given to the coastal provinces in the period between 1979 and 1994. This was a far cry from the policies of regional autarchy that shaped the political economy of China's space in the Maoist era.

However, the policies of the reform period, while benefiting China nationally, have led to increasing disparities in the level of economic development between the Western, Central, and Eastern regions. Thus, for example, in the period from 1982 to 2000, when the nations Gross Domestic Product grew from 47.84 to 57.29 percent, the Western region's share decreased from 21.98 to 17.31 percent. This slower growth was reflected in economic indexes such as per capita income, with income in the Western region more than two times lower than in the Eastern region in 2000. This represents a substantial decline from the 33 percent rate in 1982. By the early 1990s this growing regional disparity had become a matter of serious concern to the national government, which in 1999 announced a Western Development Strategy designed to increase economic growth in the Western region and reduce the disparity.

There were also underlying geopolitical realities that lay behind this decision. The Western region of China makes up 71.8 percent of China's land area and contains some 28.5 percent of the population. It is a region of great physiographic, demographic, and economic diversity. The twelve provinces that make up the region stretch from Inner Mongolia in the North to Guizhou and Yunnan in the South and from Tibet and Xinjiang in the West to Sichuan in the East. This region has historically played an important role in the Chinese imagination and the creation of the national image. The idea of the Western region as a frontier (developed by Owen Lattimore in the 1930s2) is a recurring motif of Chinese history, and unlike the settlement frontiers of the United States, Canada, and Australia, the Western part of China was not just a largely empty land peopled by indigenous inhabitants but, at various times in China's history, a major center of Chinese culture and civilization, particularly during the Han and Tang dynasties. But since the end of the Tang the region has suffered a long decline (except for the brief interlude of Maoist autarchy and Western Front development), characterized by increasing environmental deterioration and slow development.

Further aggravating its environmental problems is the fact that this region is one...