Developmental State’s Origins in Northeast China: Institutions, Geopolitics and Early-Late Development, 1918-1931

Mingke Ma, University of Oxford

This paper examines how a warlord regime in Republican China, the Fengtian Clique, shaped the indigenous industrial transformation of Northeast China (Manchuria) under its governance (1918-1931). It builds a theoretical framework that highlights the role of institutions, geopolitics, and time (development eras) in shaping state-led development. This framework focuses on the evolutions between state-market relations and organisation-technology interactions and the role of cross-border forces embedded in the global financial, economic and security orders in shaping these domestic institution-building processes. It also pays attention to the changing nature of geopolitical hegemony across the longue durée of global industrial transformation and investigate how such historical structure shape viable policy and institutional formations for industrial development across time. This paper adopts the process tracing method to evaluate the Fengtian Clique’s performance in building effective state apparatus, accommodating geopolitical tensions, creating the financial foundation for industrial entrepreneurship through agricultural extraction and banking centralisation, and constructing modern industrial enterprises. Based on Chinese and Japanese archives, this paper argues that the Fengtian Clique constructed an indigenous developmental state with effective domestic institutions to build indigenous industrial competitiveness by implementing financial and industrial policies that were adaptive to the geopolitically imposed policy space. However, the eventual demise of this developmental state, following Northeast China’s colonisation by Japan in 1931, was due to the Fengtian Clique’s failure to uphold the previously negotiated development space with the major geopolitical stakeholders in the region. By using interwar Northeast China as a case, this paper aims to re-conceptualise the developmental state concept based on the state’s measures to promote industrial transformation and its adaptiveness to domestic and geopolitical constraints. The paper suggests the necessity of recognising the evolving characteristics of effective state interventions in promoting industrialisation across time to investigate the foundations of state-led development under different temporal and geopolitical settings.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 154. Rethinking the Developmental State 1: The Roots of a Developmental State in China and Taiwan