Southern China: Industry, Development and Industrial Policy

The volume aims at contributing to the studies on contemporary industry, by concentrating on one of the key locations of global manufacturing: Southern China. Here the gradual opening of the Chinese economy started as an experimental laboratory and gave burst to the great economic and social changes that China experienced in the last decades. Such changes did not affect China only: the whole international contemporary industry started to evolve, offering new structures of production and suggesting unexplored equilibria among public intervention, private initiative and international capitals. In this scenario, the book offers an updated analysis of the last three decades of development in the southern Guangdong Province, one of the main engines of the Chinese Economy. The volume sheds light on the industrial development policies promoted by governments at different levels. It offers a detailed analysis of provincial policies, from the “Special Economic Zones” programme to more recent interventions to rebalance the industrial development growth across territories. It highlights the coordination of provincial policies with the national long-term strategic guidelines. It goes into the details of the specific measures promoted at the local level to foster industrial development providing a unique body of knowledge on the programs that are in charge of pushing industrial specialisation, innovation and technological upgrading at the single township level.