I-El auge de la política industrial de China entre 1978 y 2020. Barry Naughton
II- The Trajectory of China’s Industrial Policies —IGCC Working Paper, junio de 2023
Barry Naughton y la clave que matiza todo nuestro análisis: China no triunfó “por” la política industrial actual, sino que la política industrial actual se apoya en el éxito previo de la reforma
El texto de Barry Naughton es muy importante para este análisis porque introduce una corrección imprescindible: no debemos atribuir mecánicamente el éxito económico chino a la política industrial actual. Naughton sostiene que el ascenso espectacular de China se debe sobre todo al ciclo 1978-2005/2006: reforma de mercado, apertura exterior, inversión en capital físico y humano, migración rural-urbana, dividendo demográfico e integración en la economía mundial. La gran política industrial intervencionista, en cambio, aparece con fuerza después de 2006, se acelera tras la crisis financiera global de 2008-2010 y se intensifica aún más con la estrategia de innovación desde 2015-2016.
-The rise of China´s Industrial policy 1978 to 2020-
Barry Naughton muestra cómo la política industrial china ha evolucionado desde 1978 hacia un esfuerzo cada vez más amplio de movilización de recursos y dirección estatal de sectores estratégicos.
China has rapidly emerged to become a large economy and a technological power. Although still a middle-income country, China now has the world’s second most important high-tech sector, as well as the world’s largest manufacturing and internet sectors. These are remarkable achievements by any standard. Moreover, just as recognition of China’s developmental success has spread, China’s leadership has begun to demand a greater international “voice,” and a more prominent place for China in the global system. These enormous changes are placing huge demands on the resilience and adaptability of the world system, and at the same time on our understanding and ability to analyze accurately. Remarkable economic success provokes responses on an international level, but also domestically, as Chinese policy-makers react to new capabilities and opportunities. With so many factors changing at once, it is hard to pin down the drivers of change. A question of particular importance is this: To what extent can China’s undeniable economic and technological success be reasonably attributed to specific policies, and more generally to a Chinese path,” or program of industrial policy? China is big and complex, so from a distance it is natural to assume that many elements of policy are successful, in essence, the idea that “they must be doing something right.” To be sure, China has done many things right. Therefore, it is essential to dive deeper and discriminate among a vast range of policies, in order to ask the question of what it is that China has done right. This volume makes a contribution to that process by disentangling specific threads of China’s economic development policies over the past forty years. The objective is not to try to evaluate the effectiveness of specific policies, but simply to reliably track what policy was in effect during different periods, and where we might expect to see large and important impacts
Since 1978, the beginning of China’s period of “reform and opening,” market-oriented system reform and openness to the outside world have been the most prominent features of China’s policy orientation. Through the early years of the 21st century, market transition was undoubtedly the overwhelming focus of Chinese policy-makers. Even then, policy was gradual and incremental, and also exceptionally mutable, tackling different issues at different times, and moving forward sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Over the long term, taking into account all these policy shifts and turns of direction, China did extremely well, achieving unprecedented success.
Moreover, there is little debate about the nature and cause of this achievement: China shifted to a market economy, growth accelerated, and rapid structural and technological upgrading followed. Less widely appreciated, however, is that from about 2006, China began to make further fundamental shifts in development strategy. Direct government intervention in the economy —which had dwindled to almost nothing in the years 1998-2005— gradually began to increase. This shift at first attracted little attention. It came after a period of minimal government intervention in the sectoral structure of the economy, as policy-makers had focused on creating the institutional infrastructure of a market economy, solving the problems of state-owned enterprises, and joining the World
Trade Organization. As those things were being accomplished, it was not surprising that policy-makers shifted attention to fixing things that were not working (such as health insurance and rural taxation) and also toward shaping policy for the next phase of growth. Besides, the changes were at first quite modest. As is described in Chapter 3, beginning in 2006, China promulgated a series of policies and programs that represented the launch of its modern industrial policies. From that point, China, with increasing determination, began to increase the level of direct government intervention. During the Global Financial Crisis (gfc), as part of a massive stimulus program, China dramatically increased direct government intervention and the experience gave policymakers increasing confidence in their new path. This new Chinese government effort expanded just as the Chinese economy was slowing.
To be sure, the new policy package was a response to the slowdown, not the cause of it. In the 1980s and 1990s, market reforms had coincided with China’s highest growth potential, as under-employed farmers migrated to new rural and urban occupations and China enjoyed a massive demographic dividend. Now, policy-makers were searching for —in their favorite phrase— “new growth drivers.”1 In addition, from about 2015-2016, it became clear that artificial intelligence and big data had huge potential economic effects on economies worldwide. As technological change has accelerated, the ambition of China’s planners and policy-makers has also expanded, and intervention has continued and increased. Indeed, China’s development strategy today may warrant a new name: China aspires to be the first “government-steered market economy.
These dramatic changes need to be better understood. This essay contributes to this understanding by tracing the different stages through which Chinese industrial policy and planning have passed through over the last forty years. It will immediately become clear from this review that there is a great difference between China’s development strategy and outcomes between two long periods.
Between 1978 and about 2005, China’s government steadily retreated from its initially all-encompassing control of the economy, growth accelerated, and comprehensive upgrading took place. New policies began to be initiated in 2006, starting slow and then accelerating. From 2009 through 2020, the government has strongly re-engaged in direct economic intervention, all while the economy has been steadily slowing (even before the coronavirus impact in 2020). To be sure, there is not a cause and effect relation between government intervention and economic slowdown, and it is also true that the slowdown has led policy-makers to increase their intervention. Nonetheless, there is a huge disconnect between the success that we attribute to the Chinese economy today and the orientation of Chinese policy today. China’s emergence as an economic and technological super-power is due primarily to the policy package that it followed from 1978 through the first decade of the 21st century, that is, until about 2006-7. China’s policy package today —that is, the policies that started tentatively after 2005 but were fully in place by 2008-2010— are radically different. Because of this, it is a mistake to attribute China’s success to the policies China is currently following. These policies are simply too recent to have had a determinative impact on today’s outcomes. China is a technological superpower because it followed smart policies after 1978, pursuing marketization and investment in human and physical capital. Whether or not the industrial policies that have been followed in the most recent decade will contribute to China’s technological and economic prowess is not yet clear. This distinction is particularly important as a newly assertive China, under Xi Jinping, calls for a “China road” that deserves recognition in the global marketplace of ideas, and yet rarely, if ever, specifies what the elements are that make up this “China road.
This book has examined and described China’s industrial policy, going back to 1978 and taking the story up through 2020. A few simple conclusions have emerged clearly from our investigation. China passed a major policy turning-point in 2006, beginning a steadily increasing commitment to the use of government industrial policy. That commitment increased around 2009-2010, after the Global Financial Crisis. Most recently, with a further shift in 2015-2016, the government launched a new and intensified round of industrial policy under the rubric of the Innovation-Driven Development Strategy (idds). This new round is bigger, more intrusive, and more comprehensive than any previous Chinese industrial policy. It is unprecedented.
In examining the idds, we have discovered that it is technologically and economically more sophisticated than any predecessors. Technologically, it can be seen as a response to the opportunity provided by a new wave of technological change, a set of “general purpose” technologies that potentially will provide a long-term productivity boost to many sectors of the economy.
Moreover, this type of revolutionary technological change potentially provides a justification for industrial policy, since we have no reason to believe that unfettered market forces will be effective in capturing the spill-overs and complementarities between technological advance in different sectors. Moreover, the dependence of these new technologies on government-provided “new infrastructure” also creates an argument for the government to take a more activist role. Economically, China’s policies are less distortionary than previous policies based on administrative instruments. They rely heavily on economic levers such as tax exemptions, and subsidized depreciation and research, to say nothing of the massive Industrial Guidance Funds described in Chapter 5. These initiatives provide the possibility that China’s industrial policy will be carried out with lower overall cost than would otherwise be the case
China deserves credit for these important initiatives. Yet at the same time, there are substantial risks involved in the course that China is taking. Even when markets cannot be relied upon to produce socially optimal outcomes, it does not follow that government can always substitute effectively for the market. Policymakers do not have a clearer vision of the future than individual entrepreneurs, and the ultimate impact of their policy interventions is often very different from what they intended. A discussion of the actual impact of China’s industrial policies today is beyond the scope of this work, but we can clearly see that China’s policy-makes are creating an enormous expenditure of public funds that might not pay off, and are thus taking on substantial risk. We can identify three overarching types of risk that the policies encounter: technological, economic, and international
Technological risk is present because the ultimate configuration of the new network and a.i. based technologies is unknown. Being a pioneer subjects China to the risk of investing in secondbest technologies that turn out to be expensive and quickly obsolete. What kind of smart networks will ultimately prove most effective in managing traffic based on autonomous vehicles? Which machine learning algorithms will ultimately be trusted to process the choices and mistakes of individual citizens? What will the factories of the future look like? These questions will only be worked out gradually over future decades. Yet today the average per capita household income in China (2019 data) was 42,359 for urban households and 16,021 rmb for rural households. Even at the generous purchasing power parity (ppp) conversion of 4.184 to the us dollar (the finding of the 2017 round of the International Comparison Project), that means that the average urban income was just over $10,000, and the average rural income was just under $4,000. Does it make sense for a middle income country of this sort to be taking such a disproportionate part of the risky expenditure involved in pioneering new technologies? From a purely economic perspective it does not, but of course policymakers have other considerations in mind as well
Economic risk is present because of the attraction of resources to targeted sectors. These risks were discussed in Chapter 5. Ultimately, the government is subsidizing returns for tens of thousands of uncoordinated investments in perhaps a hundred related sectors. The situation is replete with moral hazard, because the government is offering multiple implicit guarantees which it will be unable to sustain if returns from these investments are less robust than the government hopes. The economic risk could thus be manifest in acute or chronic economic illness. Acute crisis could develop if the interlocking network of investments suddenly breaks down, due to some sudden withdrawal of liquidity. Chronic economic illness will develop if government is unable to liquidate multiple poor investments in which it has a stake, tying up credit and real resources in poorly performing assets and zombie companies. These risks are real, over a 3 to 10 year horizon
International risk arises from the reaction of other countries to China’s industrial policies. Obviously, this risk has already become seriously manifest in the explosive trade war between the u.s. and China and the extensive technological sanctions that the u.s. has already applied to some Chinese companies, such as the telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei. Some aspects of the u.s. response are in violation of international law and appear rash and foolhardy. Yet one can hardly avoid the conclusion that some kind of international backlash against China’s industrial policies was inevitable. The world has a complex set of agreements that guard against government subsidies of exports, to which China, as a w.t.o. member, is a signatory. China has been able to sidestep those obligations largely because it is such a large economy that it can provide massive industrial subsidies targeted at its domestic economy in the expectation that these will later, and less directly, subsidize exports as well. As a result, these subsidies do not automatically trigger legal action against export subsidies (defined as a wedge between domestic prices and export prices), allowing China to defend them as domestic policies. Such a situation cannot possibly be sustainable in the long run. Other countries —and not just the u.s.— simply won’t agree to a situation where their most formidable competitor (China) is able to engage in a vast range of subsidy behavior that effects their most valuable markets and exports.
It is unclear to what extent Chinese policy-makers have considered the technological, economic, and international risks of their industrial policies. It appears rather that policy-makers have been seduced by the vision of a technological revolution and a substantial re-ordering of global strategic relations and have rushed ahead with an aggressive and decisive round of industrial policies. At a minimum, this is an enormous gamble. As stated repeatedly in this essay, Chinese would in any case have emerged as a technology giant over the next decade or two. It is not necessarily beneficial to have government forcibly attempt to accelerate the process, creating substantial additional risk, waste, and conflict. Indeed, it may end up seriously retarding the global benefits that are potentially available from new technologies, particularly if the world ends up partitioned into competing technological blocks. Chinese industrial policies are so large, and so new, that we are not yet in a position to evaluate them. They may turn out to be successful, but it is also possible that they will turn out to be disastrous. Obviously, many other intermediate outcomes are also possible.
One thing we can say with certainty, however, is that China’s world-shaking economic success cannot be attributed to industrial policy. Quite the contrary, as we showed in Chapter 2 and 3, the explosive growth that propelled China out of poverty to become the second-largest economy in the world was due to deep structural factors and market-oriented reforms. Industrial policy played no role in it, since industrial policies essentially did not exist before 2006. Since that time, they have steadily ramped up, but there have been substantial lags in setting up new institutions and projects and actually making investments. China’s industrial policies are unprecedented. It is not yet clear what their impact will be.
- https://docs.dusselpeters.com/CECHIMEX/Naughton2021_Industrial_Policy_in_China_CECHIMEX.pdf?utm_source
Claves
Capitalismo de Estado, tierras raras y competencia sistémica: la arquitectura china del poder industrial
- https://articulosclaves.blogspot.com/2026/05/tierras-raras-el-control-de-china.html
- https://articulosclaves.blogspot.com/2026/05/capitalismo-de-estado-tierras-raras-y.html
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Resumen del análisis: China, Estados Unidos, Europa y España desde el método RMS
- https://articulosclaves.blogspot.com/2026/05/resumen-del-analisis-china-estados.html
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