Abstract
The rapid growth of the Wenzhou economy is very unusual in that it has been based on privatization without tumult within transitional China, even during the planned economy regime before China’s industrial economic reforms started in the early 1980s. Since then, the “Wenzhou Model” has become well-known in China. Wenzhou is a municipality in southeast Zhejiang province on the east coast of China, with a total population of seven million. During the communist-planned economic regime, there had been little building of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or township-village enterprises (TVEs) in the area. Some scholars claim that local poverty had a part in this, since TVEs and sometimes SOEs were often financed out of local resources. Also Wenzhou is just across the straits from Taiwan and was always a stronghold of the nationalists, and strongly pro-capitalist.
We thank participants from both Chu KeZheng College and School of Economics at Zhejiang University, for the survey and their work on the database set-up and data process. Special thanks are due for the excellent research assistance from Yuan Ma, Yang Liu, Meng Meng Ge, Qiqi Cheng, Jing Hao, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Hongchun Zhao, Quan Li and Lina Kay for their excellent research assistance. Many thanks to the participants of the Workshop on State, Community and Market for their useful comments, particularly to Jikun Huang, Kei Otsuka, Gus Ranis, Scott Rozelle and Tetsushi Sonobe. All remaining errors are ours.
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© 2010 John Strauss, Edward Y. Qian, Minggao Shen, Dong Liu, Mehdi Majbouri, Qi Sun, Qianfan Ying, and Yi Zhu
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Strauss, J. et al. (2010). Private-Sector Industrialization in China: Evidence from Wenzhou. In: Otsuka, K., Kalirajan, K. (eds) Community, Market and State in Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295018_16
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