Modern Economic Development in Time and Place: Why Japan and China?

Abstract

China and Japan are two countries that have been related in critically different ways at various historical points. China dominated the region until the nineteenth century. The Meiji Restoration in late nineteenth-century Japan and chaos, decay, political turmoil, and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China around the same time set the two countries onto distinct paths of modern development. Japan’s leadership in East Asia’s high-speed economic growth in the early post-World War II decades further set it apart from China. When China embarked on its economic reform and opening over 30 years ago, the two countries were so divergent in so many ways that not many would think they were even comparable.