Against the background of a rapidly collapsing socialist empire in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union, socialist China has since the late 1970s
consciously endeavored to develop a "socialist market economy with Chinese
characteristics." This thesis assesses the process of economic and spatial
transformation in the Zhujiang (Pearl River) Delta, one of the fastest growing
economic regions in China. The purposes are to identify the general pattern of
economic and spatial changes, to determine the key forces responsible for such
changes, and to explore the theoretical implications of these changes in the
broader context of interpretation about the operating mechanism of regional
development. The overall objective is to understand how a regional economy
under socialism is transformed after the intrusion of global market forces.
My analyses of regional data and indepth case studies reveal that the
Zhujiang Delta has since 1979 moved away from the previous impasse of
involutionary growth or growth without development and entered a new era of
real transformative development in which dramatic growth has occurred not only
in agricultural and industrial output but also in labour productivity, per capita
income, and employment. The take-off of the delta's regional economy has owed
little to the expansion of state-run modern manufacturing, but has been fueled
primarily by numerous small-scale, labour-intensive, and rural-base industries.
The spatial outcome of this rural industrialization has been a rapid urbanization of
the countryside, especially of the area adjacent to and between major metropolitan
centres. There has been no increasing concentration of population in large cities as
the conventional wisdom of urban transition might have predicted.
Regional development in the Zhujiang Delta during the 1980s was not an
outcome of any active state involvement. It was instead a result of relaxed control
by the socialist central state over the delta's regional economy. Local
governments, along with the collective and private sectors, are found to be the
chief agents responsible for the transformation of the peasant economy and the
development of the transport infrastructure. The penetration of global market
forces via Hong Kong into the Zhujiang Delta has significantly facilitated the
process of economic, spatial, and social transformation.
This study of the operating mechanism of regional development in the
Zhujiang Delta presents a dialectical model of local-global interaction to combat
the two prevailing schools of exogenism and endogenism. It also suggests that
previous theories on Chinese regional development, which assumed a strong
socialist central state monopolizing local economic affairs, might need fundamental
modifications. For the Zhujiang Delta, the development of which is still in the
early take-off stage, the establishment of a modern transport infrastructure has
shown remarkable effects, leading to rather than following the growth of the
delta's economy. Finally, the relocation of transnational capital and
manufacturing production from Hong Kong to the Zhujiang Delta has not
displayed a spatial tendency of high concentration in the primate city as the
conventional theory of globalization would suggest. Non-economic factors such as
historical, cultural, and social linkages between investors and their target regions
are found to have played a major role which should not be overlooked in
understanding the mechanism and spatial patterns of the internationalization of
production.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8768 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Lin, George Chu-Sheng |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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