Author's Response: China's Rural Development in Comparative Perspective

I want to thank Asia Policy for inviting me to participate in this roundtable and the reviewers for their deep engagement with Mobilizing for Development. I wrote this book to address what Thomas Gold rightly describes as a "gaping lacuna" in the literature on East Asia's political economy. The developmental state paradigm, first proposed by Chalmers Johnson nearly four decades ago, has successfully weathered various criticisms and even experienced something of a resurgence in recent years, as interest in industrial policy, alternatives to neoliberalism, and the so-called China model has grown.¹ Yet, despite the theory's success at explaining state-guided industrialization in East Asia, the story of the region's rural transformation has largely been neglected by scholars.

The main contribution of my book is to push back against conventional explanations for rural development—namely, initial conditions, land reform, technocratic planning, and trickle-down industrialization—and to highlight the important role of rural organizations and state campaigns in the region. The book's core argument is not just that these things mattered but that they worked differently in different political-institutional contexts, producing a range of outcomes both across and within the cases examined. In this essay, I would like to address the reviewers' observations regarding case selection, the conceptual framework, and the argument.

Cases

While there are many China experts in the field of comparative politics, China is actually rarely studied from a cross-national comparative perspective. This is perhaps because so much about the country is exceptional—its size, diversity, economic system, and political regime, to name just a few dimensions. It is therefore only natural that readers would question whether the cases and time periods featured in my work are sensible. The rationale for comparing Taiwan and South Korea during the 1950s to 1970s and China during the 1980s to 2000s is twofold. First, those decades were the most important for industrial takeoff and rural development. China's level of development and economic performance in the 1980s were also similar to Taiwan's and South Korea's in the 1950s, and indeed much of China's success during the early reform era under Deng Xiaoping was about playing catch-up from the Maoist period (1949–76).² Second, the 1970s in Taiwan and South Korea and the 2000s in China marked the beginning of agricultural adjustment in those countries—when government policy changed from squeezing the rural sector to protecting it. Moreover, it is quite interesting that in all three cases agricultural adjustment initially took the form of a campaign.

Extending the analysis forward for Taiwan and South Korea, as Lynette Ong's review suggested, would have painted a very different picture of the countryside: a highly subsidized and much shrunken agricultural sector undergoing difficult structural reforms. While potentially interesting, the heyday for Taiwanese and South Korean rural development occurred before the 1980s, not after, and the democratization of those countries would have further complicated the comparison with China. Extending the analysis backward for China, as both Ong and Gold suggested, would similarly have made the three cases less comparable. China's economy under Mao Zedong was mostly stagnant, and collective institutions such as rural people's communes made China very different from its neighbors. It is precisely because land reform in the early 1950s was followed by collectivization that China's later, post-1978 experiences with de-collectivization and other policies are more analogous to what happened elsewhere in the region.³ And since the book addresses two big questions about rural development—what explains East Asia's success compared to other regions, and what explains different levels of success among East Asian countries—it was essential to study the most crucial (and comparable) periods of rural development in these countries. That calculus mattered more for case selection than the fact that China under reform has been characterized by some (but not all) scholars as a developmental state or that China has learned from its neighbors' rural policies.

Concepts

The reviewers raised several questions about what constitutes a campaign. Jessica Teets asserted...