Digital World

2 Politics of digital development

Informatization and governance in China

Xiudian Dai

 

Introduction

The much-debated rise of the post-war Japanese economy, described as a ‘miracle’, followed by the emergence of other Asian tigers such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1980s and onward, served as empirical evidence supporting the developmental state argument championed by Chalmers Johnson (1982: 3). Differing from a regulatory state, such as the US, that promotes competition and protects consumer interest through regulations and market, the developmental state industrializes and leads the industrialization drive, thus taking on developmental functions (Johnson 1982). Johnson's developmental state theory is seen ‘as a causal ...