| This dissertation examines the transfer of a set of economic ideas from Japan to China in the first decades of the twentieth century. It focuses on a set of institutions set up by the Japanese state to channel overseas market and technological information to producers in rural Japan, and shows that these ideas had a major impact on the way Chinese thinkers conceived China's strategy of industrialization. I show that in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), Chinese visitors to Japan learned a Japanese-style industrial policy and -- with the backing of Yuan Shikai -- reproduced it in Zhili Province in North China. They created a network of commercial museums, experiment stations and industrial schools centering on Tianjin, and made efforts to promote small-scale and labor-intensive manufacturing activities in the countryside. By tracing the impact of this information infrastructure on the national debate both at the National Conference on Commerce and Industry (1912) and throughout the interwar period amongst industrialists, policymakers and economists, I argue that the "Japan-Zhili model" shaped Kuomintang policy in the Nanjing Decade (1927-37). Looking westwards from Japan, despite the vast amount of data that Japan had collected on China, Japan remained unable either to theorize its own model of development or to analyze and interpret Chinese industrialization as an expression of nationalism, and in the end Japan resorted to suppressing acts of Chinese "barbarism" by force. Meanwhile in China in the 1930s the more stable conditions under the Kuomintang Government allowed the implementation of an industrial policy rooted in the "Japan-Zhili model", which, along with tariff revisions and Chinese boycotts of Japanese goods, enabled China's stable economic growth in the run-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45).;Contrary to the existing scholarship that characterizes Japan as a quasi-Western or imperial power, I argue that in this period Japan was still a poor, densely-populated and resource-poor nation, and one with which China had much in common. Building on a Japanese-language historiography on the Asian international economy, I note that the small cultural and economic gap allowed ideas, institutions and technology to flow relatively freely between the two nations. This small gap not only forced the upgrade of Japanese industries with continuous competitive pressures from below, but also facilitated the diffusion of the path of labor-intensive industrialization to rural parts of Asia that Japan did not directly colonize. I aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary literature on development studies by tracing the intellectual origins and practices of state-induced and private sector-led industrialization, to their roots in a period well before explicit development policies took hold after the Second World War. Finally, by focusing on the pluralistic and decentralized nature of global intellectual and technological exchange, I show that China's use of Japan as a model in this period was one of the many permutations that transcended our usual focus on the one-way of flow of ideas from the Western metropole to the periphery. This global approach is vital to our ability to delineate changes in the Sino-Japanese relationship in this period, and to overcome the "fog" of the Sino-Japanese War which long distorted historians' understanding of the relative importance of China and Japan in early twentieth-century East Asia.;Citation: Joyman Lee, "Where Imperialism Could Not Reach: Chinese Industrial Policy and Japan, 1900-40" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2013). |
