Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia

By Kristen E. Looney

Mobilizing for Development tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization.

Looney's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501748851

Book preview

MOBILIZING FOR DEVELOPMENT

The Modernization of Rural East Asia

Kristen E. Looney

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS    ITHACA AND LONDON

For Alan and Talia

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: The State and Rural Development in East Asia

1. The Role of Rural Institutions and State Campaigns in Development

2. Rural Development in Taiwan, 1950s–1970s

3. Rural Development in South Korea, 1950s–1970s

4. Rural Development in China, 1980s–2000s

Conclusion: The Rural Developmental State

Appendix

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Tables and Figures

Tables

1. The Cases

2. The Argument

3. Agricultural and Industrial Sector Change in Taiwan, 1952–1981

4. Extent and Impact of Land Reform in Taiwan

5. Percent Households Receiving FA Services in Taiwan, 1952–1959

6. Extent of KMT Representation in Taiwan’s FAs (1954 FA Election Results)

7. Community Development Policies in Taiwan, 1955–1981

8. Results of the Community Development Campaign in Taiwan, 1969–1981

9. Agricultural and Industrial Sector Change in South Korea, 1954–1981

10. Extent and Impact of Land Reform in South Korea

11. Results of the New Village Movement in South Korea, 1971–1980

12. Agricultural and Industrial Sector Change in China, 1978–2012

Figures (Appendix)

1. The Farmers’ Association System in Taiwan

2. Internal Structure of a Township Farmers’ Association in Taiwan

Acknowledgments

There are many people who made this book possible. First, I want to thank my advisers from the Harvard University Department of Government. Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have studied Chinese politics with Elizabeth Perry and Roderick MacFarquhar. I never would have undertaken a comparative, multicountry study without Liz’s initial encouragement and steadfast support. She helped me at every stage, generously offering her time, knowledge, and insights about the profession. She also opened several doors for me in China, where I was able to see firsthand just how much she has done to advance the field and assist both young and established scholars there. Rod was a similarly fantastic mentor. He taught me almost everything I know about the Maoist period and elite politics. But more than that, he pushed me to read as much as possible in Chinese and to seriously engage with the work of Chinese scholars. Sadly, he passed away as I was completing the final edits for this book. I can only hope it would have made him proud. Timothy Colton introduced me to the classic works in comparative politics and inspired me to think about China from a broader perspective. Even so, he once half-jokingly remarked that a three-country study would take me forever—a prediction that has felt pretty accurate over the years but is thankfully no longer true. Katharine Moon of Wellesley College, besides helping me to understand Korea better, has been a constant source of support since my undergraduate years when I started down this path.

I would additionally like to thank Robert Bates, Peter Hall, Nancy Hearst, Sebastian Heilmann, Nahomi Ichino, Iain Johnston, Kyung-ok Joo, Mi-hyun Kim, Steven Levitsky, Sang-suk Oh, Anthony Saich, and Andrew Walder for providing excellent instruction and advice during my graduate studies. I am also indebted to my former teachers from Wellesley who first kindled my interest in Chinese studies, including Dai Chen, Karl Gerth, Pat Giersch, Ann Huss, William Joseph, Ruby Lam, Sherry Mou, and Weina Zhao. Bill and Sherry especially influenced me to become a lifelong student of China and East Asia. Yawei Liu at the Carter Center also taught me a great deal about China during an internship there.

At various stages of this project—from half-baked ideas to early drafts, conference papers, and revised chapters—I benefited from comments by Joel Andreas, Jennifer Bachner, Harley Balzer, Richard Doner, Benjamin Goodrich, Kyle Jaros, Diana Kapiszewski, Christine Kim, James Kai-sing Kung, Didi Kuo, Wendy Leutert, Janet Lewis, Claire Schwartz Litwin, Elena Llaudet, Daniel Mattingly, Andrew Mertha, Sara Newland, Abraham Newman, Jean Oi, Benjamin Read, Maria Repnikova, Christopher Rhodes, Meg Rithmire, Jordan Sand, Sarah Shehabuddin, Graeme Smith, Dorothy Solinger, Rachel Stern, Patricia Thornton, James Vreeland, Jeremy Wallace, Xiaojun Yan, David Zweig, and the members of the George Washington University Comparative Politics Workshop. I am grateful to Rick, Andy, Ben, and Meg in particular for traveling to DC in order to participate in my book workshop, which was supported by the Georgetown University Department of Government. I must also thank my Georgetown colleagues Victor Cha, David Edelstein, Eileen Fenrich, Michael Green, Diana Kim, Charles King, Robert Lyons, Kathleen McNamara, Daniel Nexon, Irfan Nooruddin, Carole Sargent, Yuhki Tajima, Charles Udomsaph, and Ding Ye, among many others, for the extra time and support I needed to see this project through to completion. Several Georgetown students provided valuable research assistance: Jayme Amann, Brian Bumpas, Sungmin Cho, Thomas Christiansen, Minjung Kang, Jonathon Marek, Andrea Moneton, Stefan Rajiyah, Ying Sun, and Mengjia Wan. Sungmin, most of all, went above and beyond to help me understand the contemporary Korean-language scholarship on the New Village Movement. I would furthermore like to express my sincere thanks to Roger Haydon, Mary Kate Murphy, and their colleagues at Cornell University Press, as well as Glenn Novak, Kate Mertes, and two anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved the manuscript.

A number of institutions and granting agencies facilitated my research in Asia, including the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies at Academia Sinica in Taipei; the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing; the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing; the Korean Language Institute and the Department of Political Science at Yonsei University in Seoul; the Blakemore Foundation; the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange; the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University; the Foreign Language and Areas Studies Fellowships Program; and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program. Research for this book was also conducted at the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University in New York; and the University Services Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people at each of these institutions but want to give a special thanks to those who welcomed and hosted me as a visiting researcher: Professors Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao and Cheng-yi Lin at Academia Sinica; Professor Chung-in Moon at Yonsei; and Professors Yu Jianrong, Li Renqing, and Lu Lei at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In Korea, I received help and guidance from Do-hyun Han, Seung-mi Han, Joon-kyung Kim, Junmin Kim, Seung-hyun Kim, Lucy Sojung Lee, Peter Joon-sung Park, Hyeon-suk Shin, Min-young Shin, and Wonwoo Yi. In China, I was greatly helped by Li Chang-ping, Li Shuishan, Qian Qian, Song Junling, Tan Yifei, Weng Ming, Xiao Yalin, Zhao Shukai, Zhou Yi, Zou Yongxiong, and especially Ren Jianghua. I owe my positive fieldwork experience in Jiangxi to Ouyang Qiaowen, Wen Xiaomin, Yang Jingwei, Zeng Xinfang, and many others affiliated with the Ganzhou Rural Work Department and the county governments of Anyuan, Longnan, Ruijin, Shicheng, and Xingguo. Additional trips to Dazhai (thanks to Yu Jianrong), Huaxi (thanks to Zhou Yi), and Qing County, Hebei, further enriched my understanding of the Chinese countryside. I am also deeply appreciative of my friendships with Dai Shuping, Guo Yingtao, Li Shumei, Li Yi, Liu Xiaoxia, Su Dan, Su Jianjing, Yi Benyao, and Zhang Guoliang. They have supported me in immeasurable ways over the years, especially Shuping.

My friends and family have also shared their love and unwavering confidence in my ability to finish this book. I cannot possibly thank all of them, although I would like to recognize Heather Brent, Karen Colin, Joshua Friess, Jana Kiser, April Kuehnhoff, Laura Murray, Katharine Poundstone, Johnnetta Russell, Amber Samuel, Paulraj Samuel, Yael Sherman, Andrew Silverman, Cena Maxfield Smith, Van Smith, Philip Tinari, Mabel Tso, Marisa Van Saanen, Peggy Wang, Mary Ellen Wiggins, and Misti Yang for helping me to keep things in perspective. Meg Rithmire was my friend long before she became my colleague and has been there every step of the way. My incredible parents, Craig and Katherine Looney, have supported all of my choices, and my sisters, Meghan Rubiano and Shannon Looney, have always been there to lend an ear. Along with my grandparents, Jack and Jimmie Looney and Alonzo and Patricia Poll, and my in-laws, Aaron and Cathy Rappeport, they have been my biggest cheerleaders. My husband, Alan Rappeport, has been part of this book from the beginning. I will forever be grateful to him and our little ones, Talia and Buster, for reminding me of what is important.

Abbreviations

ARDP Accelerated Rural Development Program (Taiwan)

DRC Development Research Center of the State Council (China)

FA Farmers’ Association (Taiwan)

FPC Farmers’ Professional Cooperative (China)

JCRR Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction

NACF National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (South Korea)

NRA nominal rate of assistance to agriculture

ORD Office of Rural Development (South Korea)

PAC primary agricultural cooperative (South Korea)

P.L. 480 Public Law 480 Food for Peace Program

RRA relative rate of assistance to agriculture

SAIC State Administration for Industry and Commerce (China)

SAU small agricultural unit (Taiwan)

SLTI National Saemaul Leadership Training Institute (South Korea)

TVE township and village enterprise (China)

Note on Transliteration

I have used the pinyin system of transliteration from Chinese to English, except for Taiwanese author names, which appear in Wade-Giles (pinyin equivalents are listed in the Works Cited).

Full citations for the Korean-language materials follow the McCune-Reischauer system, although author names are first listed by the Revised Romanization system. The English translations of those titles come from the original publications.

Introduction

THE STATE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN EAST ASIA

Global poverty continues to be a predominantly rural phenomenon despite increasing urbanization. The World Bank estimates that 78 percent of the world’s poor, or nearly 800 million people, live in rural areas and depend on agriculture, forestry, and fishing for their livelihoods. Related to this point, the majority of people suffering from hunger are smallholder farmers in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture still accounts for one-third of gross domestic product (GDP) and three-quarters of employment.¹ Fundamentally, rural development matters for poverty reduction, food security, and economic growth. And yet, governments routinely fail their rural citizens. The history of modernization is replete with stories of promised resources that never materialize and development projects that harm the environment and displace rural communities.

The barriers to rural development are largely political. In many developing countries, ruling elites pursue industrial development at the expense of the rural sector. They regard industry as critical for national security and economic competitiveness, and many believe that industry-led growth is sufficient to reduce poverty. This preference for industry, known as urban bias, translates into a policy environment that systematically discriminates against agriculture. For decades, developing countries have relied on price controls and overvalued exchange rates to lower the cost of food, wages, and industrial inputs. Although these policy tools distort farmers’ incentives and threaten long-term agricultural productivity, they confer benefits on a diverse set of actors (government, industry, urban consumers, and large farmers) that together constitute a strong political coalition.² Empirical analysis shows that while exchange-rate distortions in the world’s least-developed countries have decreased since the late 1980s, other measures like rural-urban differences in capital stocks, government expenditures, and public service outcomes point to worsening conditions for the rural poor.³ The result of urban bias is growth without development—industrial growth and urban expansion occurring alongside rural stagnation and poverty.

Such policies are not, however, without political costs. In attempting to resolve one kind of dilemma, satisfying the urban-industrial coalition, modernizing states may create another in the form of high-stakes rural unrest. From protest marches to violent confrontations with police, farmers no longer resemble the sack of potatoes that Karl Marx saw as incapable of collective revolt.⁴ Take India, for example. In 2014–2015, land acquisitions and rural distress led to a surge in clashes between farmers and government agencies, posing a challenge to the newly formed National Democratic Alliance government.⁵ A few years before, in the wake of deadly conflict over industrial land grabs in West Bengal, rural citizens voted out the Communist Party, which had ruled the state for over three decades.⁶ For anyone familiar with peasant movements in Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and beyond, these kinds of stories are nothing new and have only become more prevalent with globalization.⁷ Land- and development-related conflicts have exploded across Africa as well, from Kenya to Sierra Leone and Sudan to Zimbabwe, fueling social tensions, political crises, and wars.⁸

Ironically, countries with higher levels of discrimination against agriculture are often controlled by regimes that came to power on the back of rural discontent. Following China’s example, twentieth-century communist and nationalist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America staked their legitimacy on delivering not just workers but peasants from oppression. Practically, they needed to expand their base to succeed in an agrarian context, yet once in power, they pursued modernization policies that sacrificed the countryside. The skewed allocation of resources was justified on economic as well as political grounds, since the potential for large-scale urban unrest was considered a bigger threat than localized rural protests. Previous research has shown that, in the long run, urban bias is risky, insofar as it induces migration to cities, puts a strain on urban resources, and increases the likelihood of urban collective action against the regime.⁹ Still, in other more direct ways, it can undermine ruling elites’ hold on the countryside. Protests that first appear to be localized can spread, opening up space for opposition parties or rival forces to establish a presence. Even in closed authoritarian systems, mounting rural unrest can disrupt development plans and imperil the state’s capacity to govern.

In contrast with most developing countries, East Asia emerged in the post–World War II period as a region that seemed to defy the logic of urban bias, achieving both urban-industrial growth and rural-agricultural development. Breakneck industrialization, characterized by double-digit growth rates, produced incredible prosperity. In less than two decades, between 1955 and 1970, Japan’s GDP per capita rose from around US$3,000 to over $10,000, propelling the country from lower-middle-income to high-income status using the World Bank’s classification. Taiwan and South Korea experienced a similar change, with GDP per capita climbing from less than $1,500 in 1955 to over $10,000 in 1988 and 1991, respectively, moving from the low-income to high-income categories.¹⁰

Because of the effective implementation of rural land reform, the distribution of wealth in each of these countries was remarkably egalitarian. The Gini coefficient was about .33 in Japan (1969) and South Korea (1970) and only .28 in Taiwan (1978), indicating lower levels of inequality than in most of the world, including many Western European countries (the OECD average in 1967–1972 was .36).¹¹ Public investment in irrigation and the spread of green revolution technologies, such as high-yield varieties of rice and chemical fertilizers, enabled agriculture to play a key role in the region’s postwar recovery and industrial take-off. In the 1950s–1960s, agriculture grew about 3.2 percent annually (a conservative estimate), compared to the global average of 2.7 percent.¹² Despite problems with the reliability of data for that period, the overall trends are clear: along with industrialization, the rural economy grew, household incomes improved, poverty rates dropped, and life expectancy increased. Fast-forward to the 1980s, and China would likewise boast such achievements following the spread of economic reforms.

Nevertheless, it is also true that East Asian governments exploited agriculture, eroding the prospects for long-term development and giving rise to significant rural-urban disparities. They imposed hidden taxes on rice and fertilizer, relied on cheap food imports to depress domestic prices, and directed the lion’s share of productive resources to the urban-industrial sector. The nominal and relative rates of assistance for agriculture (the NRA and RRA), which measure how domestic farm prices stack up against international market prices and nonfarm product prices, were negative in Taiwan and South Korea until about 1970, and in China until about 2000, implying that the main concern before then was to extract a rural surplus for industrialization.¹³ Of course, in the early stages of development, most governments aim to transfer resources from agriculture to industry, a strategy known as the developmental squeeze on agriculture.¹⁴ Only at the later stages are resources more likely to flow in reverse, when the problem of agricultural adjustment, or rural decline, generates sufficient political pressure to trigger a change in policy, and when the rural sector is small enough that the cost of redistribution becomes more acceptable. Even then, the transition from taxing to subsidizing agriculture is far from automatic. It happened faster in East Asia than in early industrializers, but in other parts of the developing world, reforms to agricultural price, trade, and investment policies remain gradual and uneven.¹⁵ The evolution of rural policy thus demands explanation. At the same time, it should be noted that price adjustments and the like do not capture very much about how rural transformation unfolded in the region.

The Argument in Brief

This book examines how and why East Asia achieved rural development, and it advances a theory to explain variation among East Asian countries. While the analysis has obvious relevance to the study of the region’s political economy, it was motivated by broader concerns about the role of institutions and the state in development. Since the late 1970s, scholars have stressed the effects of institutional design on economic performance. The rise of new institutional economics marked a departure from neoclassical theory, which tended to ignore institutions or regard them as constant over time.¹⁶ Related to this shift was a movement in the social sciences to bring the state back in, that is, to recognize the state as a distinct political actor, with varying degrees of autonomy and capacity but still separate from interest groups or class structures.¹⁷ Conceptual and measurement issues aside, few would disagree that East Asia has strong institutions and that industrialization was, by and large, a state-led process. The region’s success ignited debates about the merits of state intervention in the economy and a rethinking of state-market relations. Following the publication of several influential studies, it became widely accepted that regime type matters greatly for development outcomes and that the East Asian miracle could be attributed to the emergence of so-called developmental states.¹⁸

A major goal of this study is to expand and challenge the developmental state literature, which despite its contribution to explaining industrialization in East Asia, generally ignores the role of the state in rural development, fails to account for variation in the region, and excludes China from the comparative analysis. Addressing these gaps is important—the developmental state not only remains the dominant framework for understanding East Asia’s political economy, but has also informed contemporary debates about alternative (post-neoliberal) development models in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.¹⁹ Additionally, this study advances the political economy of development literature by moving beyond the traditional focus on land tenure and agricultural prices to specify the conditions under which rural institutions and state campaigns can promote development. It furthermore demonstrates that rural transformation in East Asia was not a byproduct of industrialization, but the result of aggressive interventions by strong and activist (if not exactly developmental) states.

Through a structured comparison of Taiwan, South Korea, and China, I show that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. The general argument can be summarized as follows: during the first few decades of industrialization, certain institutions facilitated growth in agricultural production. These included smallholder agriculture, a technocratic bureaucracy, and (except for China) encompassing farmers’ organizations. Although there was some variation among these countries (deriving from the impact of Japanese colonialism, US assistance, and in China’s case the legacy of socialism), they had similar institutions and exhibited the same broad patterns of rural development. Still, uneven progress along different dimensions of development occurred as a result of urban bias. Changes in incomes and infrastructure, for example, did not keep pace with agricultural production because of policies that exploited the rural sector. Eventually, fast-paced industrialization led to a deterioration of rural conditions, which raised concerns of unrest and pressures to adopt pro-rural policies. The reversal of urban bias was not, however, about the state retreating from the countryside so that market forces could then function without distortion. Instead, it was marked by the commencement of sweeping modernization campaigns, producing mixed results both within the rural sector and across national contexts.

I define campaigns as policies that aim to transform the countryside through the intensive use of bureaucratic and popular mobilization. During campaigns, governments may employ such tactics as sending official work teams to the villages, ratcheting up propaganda, setting core tasks, designating model sites, training local activists, and rewarding the most fervent participants with prizes, media attention, and other benefits designed to foster competitive emulation. Common in authoritarian and communist states, though by no means limited to them, state-led campaigns for development run the gamut from land reforms and green revolutions, to cooperative movements and collectivization schemes, to mass literacy, health, and sanitation drives. Many of them failed, sometimes tragically, and for that reason they have largely been overlooked by scholars of development or mentioned only to underscore the dangers of social engineering.²⁰ Nevertheless, within East Asia, campaigns are often described as powerful tools for state-society cooperation and rural transformation, a view completely at odds with Western ideas about the illiberal and destructive tendencies of campaigns.

In fact, throughout the region, political leaders believed that campaigns were a necessary solution to the rural problem, an effective means of addressing the tensions caused by the relative decline of agriculture. While it is uncontroversial to see this kind of politics in China, given its long history of state-sponsored campaigns, it is somewhat surprising to find it in the wider region. Technocratic governance and careful economic planning are key features of the developmental state model. Yet shifting the focus from industrial policy to rural policy reveals a different type of politics. To borrow Max Weber’s terminology, campaigns are a manifestation of charismatic authority, and institutions are rooted in bureaucratic or legal authority.²¹ These modes of politics are distinct but not mutually exclusive: the same technocrats who follow administrative routines can also be revolutionaries who serve as a conduit for campaigns. Whereas previous studies have dismissed the region’s campaigns as misguided deviations from a more successful, technocratic approach to development, I contend that they had a major impact on the countryside, especially in terms of changing the village environment (infrastructure, sanitation, housing), and that divergent development outcomes may be explained by the interaction of campaigns and institutions. Looking at this dynamic, rather than institutions alone, provides a more complete understanding of how rural development occurred in East Asia.

To clarify, by interaction I mean, first, that institutions and campaigns matter for different types of outcomes—complex goals like the promotion of scientific agriculture versus technically simpler goals like basic construction projects—so attention to both variables is crucial for understanding rural development as a whole. Second, the quality of rural institutions, namely local governments and farmers’ organizations, and their relationship with the central government, affects campaign outcomes. Specifically, I argue that campaigns are more likely to succeed when the overarching goal is development rather than extraction, when the center can control local authorities, and when the campaign is carried out in partnership with rural citizens. I further hypothesize that farmers’ organizations are better for development when they exhibit the right balance of linkage and autonomy vis-à-vis the state and the village community. Effective farmers’ organizations can provide an institutionalized way of transferring resources in and out of the rural sector, resulting in stronger extension services and longer-term productivity gains. They can also strengthen the government’s commitment to rural development and, in the context of a campaign, push back against negligent or overzealous officials.

The next chapter presents a more formal discussion of the theory and causal mechanisms that connect institutions, campaigns, and rural development. Here I would like to emphasize it was not just the use of campaigns but the timing of them that was unusual: they occurred at the later stages of industrialization when, supposedly, the benefits of growth had begun to trickle down to the countryside, and after these regimes had settled into a postrevolutionary phase of governance. This book upends the assumptions about these stages, and, in doing so, offers an entirely new perspective on East Asia’s economic and political development.

Empirical Context

I focus on the 1950s–1970s for Taiwan and South Korea and the 1980s–2000s for China because these decades were the most important for industrialization and rural development. Though rarely thought of as agricultural anymore, these countries initially had large and growing rural populations. In early 1950s Taiwan, more than 4 million people, comprising over 50 percent of the total population, lived in the countryside; and in South Korea, upward of 13 million people, or more than 60 percent of the total population, were considered rural. The rural population in each country peaked around 1967 and then started to decline, but the rural share of the total population remained above 30 percent until roughly 1980. At the start of China’s reform period in 1978, about 790 million people, or 82 percent of the total population, lived in the countryside. The rural population peaked in the early 1990s and then began to drop, although the share of the rural population stayed above 50 percent until 2011. Even with record levels of rural-to-urban migration and structural changes in the rural economy, agriculture continues to account for about one-third of total employment in China.²²

Even though China is a much larger country and is controlled by a communist government, it shares some things in common with Taiwan and South Korea, including a technocratic bureaucracy that prioritizes growth and a development ideology that supports significant state intervention in the market. It furthermore sees itself as part of the East Asian model, which, with regard to rural development, is rooted in the existence of a strong state and a smallholder farm economy. This circumstance provides the basis for state-led development, whether through governmental (and quasi-governmental) institutions or through rural modernization campaigns. I do not mean to suggest that China is a developmental state. As other scholars have shown, it loosely fits the model at best.²³ But the resemblances in rural policy are striking, in part because East Asian countries looked to one another’s experience with land reform, rural cooperatives, the green revolution, and so forth. Certainly, with any comparative project, there are variables that cannot be controlled, yet having two cases that are similar (Taiwan and Korea) allows for a more effective evaluation of alternative explanations such as colonial heritage. At the same time, including a third case that is quite different (China) allows for the incorporation of some of those differences into theory development. For example, I assert that the strength