Mirroring Success: Emulation as a Strategy for State Capacity in Late Developers

• In Event: Historical Political Economy of State Building

Brief Overview

How do late-developing countries build state capacity? This paper argues political elites turn to emulation. Using China as a case, we show how Chinese elites used Japan and Russia as models for state building, based on historical newspaper analysis.

Authors

• Peng Peng, Washington University in St Louis

• Haohan Chen, The University of Hong Kong

• Yingtian He, Tsinghua University