Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel will bring together leading scholars of comparative political economy to discuss Kristen Looney’s book, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (forthcoming May 2020, with Cornell University Press). The panelists include experts in China and East Asia, the specific site of the book, and scholars who have written about rural development in SE Asia, South Asia, and Latin America. This will allow a broad comparative analysis of this important new book.


For nearly four decades, scholars have attributed East Asia’s economic growth to the emergence of developmental states and the effective use of industrial policy. Despite many criticisms of this theory, it not only remains the dominant framework for understanding the region’s political economy, but also continues to inform wider debates about global development models and alternatives to neoliberalism. Mobilizing for Development shifts the focus from industrial policy to rural policy and offers a new perspective on East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. It explains variation in rural development outcomes across and within East Asian countries, comparing Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s) as they transitioned from poor to middle-income status. Drawing on a wealth of archival and documentary sources, the book highlights the importance of rural modernization campaigns—defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to overhaul traditional ways of rural life—and argues 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 technocratic and market-conforming and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. This author-meets-critics roundtable seeks to shed light on important issues of statist development strategies, rural-urban redistributive politics, and extra-institutional approaches to policy implementation in different political contexts, among democracies and non-democracies in the developing world.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Chair

• Irfan Nooruddin Georgetown University

Presenters

• Kristen E. Looney Georgetown University

• Mary E. Gallagher University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Ashutosh Varshney Brown University

• Stephan Haggard University of California, San Diego

• Roselyn Hsueh Temple University

• Marcus J. Kurtz Ohio State University