The Rise of Industrial Policy in China, 1978-2012

This study examines the forces that facilitated the surge of national industrial policy programs in China after 2004. We trace the formative role of transnational exchanges with Japan for Chinese policy conceptions. Rivaling political and administrative actors filtered out those conceptions that could serve as either transitional or defensive policy recipes for pursuing their bureaucratic interests. During the 1990s, a core group of industrial policy advocats, through a series of largescale research projects and program drafting efforts, became a driving force at the center of a broader policy coalition. While this coalition was overlooked or underrated in Western research, its statist agenda came to dominate the peak bodies of policy-making under the Hu-Wen administration. Whereas many studies of Chinese economic administration focus on plan vs. market or vs. private sector controversies, we suggest that four major advocacy coalitions are discernible in the contested arena of economic governance and state guidance.