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37 2 Why Do Similar Areas Adopt Different Developmental Strategies? You take your bright path. I’ll traverse my narrow wooden bridge. —Chinese saying The top leaders of Guizhou and Yunnan set about establishing and implementing strikingly dissimilar strategies to effect economic improvements. Even the goals pursued were markedly different. Why did the leaders of two similar provinces do so? After all, these leaders faced similar challenges, operated in similar contexts, and answered to the same vigilant and opinionated bosses in the central government. So we expect them to have adopted similar policies and approaches. Were the contrasting strategies adopted due to initiatives from provincial leaders, some centrally initiated experiment, a historical or geographical factor, or a combination of these factors? My evidence suggests that, although the central government constrained and encouraged certain actions and approaches in the provinces, the experiences and backgrounds of the individual provincial leaders affected the choices of strategies. Moreover, once a particular course was set and had received central support, a form of path dependency caused the strategy to continue even after the original leaders had departed. Scholars have studied the variety of strategies and policies that Chinese provincial and local governments have adopted. The earliest contemporary studies of subnational governments provided insights into Mao Zedong’s era. Dorothy Solinger (1977b) studied the process of integrating the sometimes autonomous and restive provinces of southwestern China into the newly formed PRC. David Goodman (1986) analyzed the diverse experiences of Sichuan and Guizhou during the Great Leap Forward. Victor Falkenheim (1969) analyzed the Cultural Revolution as implemented in Fujian, Yunnan, and Guangxi. With the launch of the reform era, and especially after the more recent moves toward “soft centralization,” provincial decision making has become more autonomous and influential (Mertha 2005; Naughton 1993; Li 1998). Because provincial governments now implement central policy in 38 Chapter 2 diverse ways, as well as design their own strategies and approaches independent of Beijing, studies focusing on central decision making no longer (if they ever did) provide a complete picture of Chinese politics. Provincial governments, although answerable to the center through the nomenklatura system (Chan 2004; Sheng 2005), have sufficient autonomy to be considered decision makers in their own right and thus provide a good laboratory in which to study the design, implementation, and effects of policy. Given the great importance of the provinces, however, the number of explicitly comparative studies of Chinese provinces, although not trivial, is surprisingly small. Many studies confine their analysis to single localities (Goodman 1997; Hendrischke and Feng 1999; Fitzgerald 2002; Cheung, Chung, and Lin 1998). Other research has been more systematically comparative (Chung 1995). For instance, Chung Jae Ho (2000) has studied the variation in the implementation of rural reform in pioneering (Anhui), bandwagoning (Shandong), and resisting (Heilongjiang) provinces; Elizabeth Remick (2004) compares tax collection in Tianjin and Guangdong, both during the republican and the early reform eras; and Linda Li (1998) has studied investment policy in Shanghai and Guangdong. These studies take advantage of the strengths of the comparative method, such as controlling for several factors to isolate important causal variables. Although these comparative studies have been crucial for understanding how development in provincial China varies, most have focused on coastal China or, sometimes, on the inland provinces; there is thus a paucity of studies on reform-era western China. The impoverished western provinces of China, with a large proportion of their populations consisting of rural poor, were largely left behind during the first years of reform. Enhancing our knowledge of the western provinces is crucial to understanding the impact of various development policies adopted at the central, provincial, and local levels. Although some studies have focused on post-1978 provincial development policies in Yunnan (e.g., Hillman 2003; Gan, Yao, and Yang 2001; Wang R. 2001; d’Hooghe 1994), and a small handful have focused on Guizhou (e.g., Oakes 2004; Wang and Zhang 2003; Wright 2003; Lv 1995), no study of which I am aware has compared the adoption of development and poverty reduction strategies by these two provinces during the reform era. Thus, this book contributes to our understanding of the reactions of provincial governments to central reform policies in the important yet understudied region of western China. In addition, between 1985 and 1988, Hu Jintao, the current president of China and general secretary of the CCP, served as the top provincial leader of Guizhou. As I discuss in the introduction , the policies in Guizhou provide insights into this poorly understood leader...

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