China's industrial policy was a deliberate import of Japan's high-growth-era template, carried by an identifiable advocacy coalition (Ma Hong's network) from 1979 onward, institutionalized in stages and generalized economy-wide after 2004.
The claim: China's industrial policy is an imported Japanese template with a documented supply chain. The chain: 1979 Deng Liqun and Ma Hong delegation reports introduce the vocabulary; 1982 Ma Hong and Shimokobe publish jointly; 1981- the China-Japan Economic Knowledge Exchange meets annually (SPC-linked); 1985-88 the reception wave (Yang Zhi, CASS Japan Institute, Komiya publishing directly in 现代日本经济); 1986-89 first institutional window, closed by retrenchment; post-2004 the template generalizes into China's organizing policy mode.
| Link in the chain | Year | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Delegation reports (Deng Liqun, Ma Hong) | 1979 | internal reports, 'much quoted' (fn. 15) |
| Ma Hong-Shimokobe joint volume | 1982 | fn. 15 |
| China-Japan Economic Knowledge Exchange | 1981- | founding in Dangde wenxian 2010/6 |
| Reception wave (CASS Japan Institute; Komiya in-journal) | 1985-88 | fn. 15; Komiya 1988b |
| First policy window | 1986-89 | industrial-policy resolutions |
| Regime generalization | 2004- | policy-document record |
One graph, two directions: an ego network centered on the book (merged cards will make it a true knowledge graph). Everything left of the book node flows in (inside out: the citation anatomy, section V). The lower-right flows out (outside in: reception and citing literature). Node size = mentions in the book; hollow dashed nodes were never engaged. Hover a node for its role and evidence; click legend entries to highlight strands (multi-select).
Sebastian Heilmann and Lea Shih (b. ). The experimentation school documenting the one channel where China did NOT experiment but imported: the same author holds the cluster's indigenous mechanism (Red Swan) and its strongest foreign-import case, in different domains — which is itself the by-domain verdict in one bibliography.
The standard citation for the Japan-to-China industrial-policy channel; seed source of the owner's by-domain study. Widely cited in the industrial-policy literature; unengaged by the reform-debate historiography whose blind spot it documents — the cluster's book-scale members cite it zero (Gewirtz), zero (Fewsmith, predates) and via Heilmann generally (Weber).
Reviews: Owner's study (clusters/)
Sources: www.merics.org · localhost:5212
An advocacy coalition (Ma Hong, the SPC/DRC network, the CASS Japan hands) imports the Japanese template through delegations, joint publications and translations, screening out Japan's failures; the conception waits in the bureaucracy until institutional windows (1986-89, post-2004) let it become organizing policy.
Scope: Industrial policy specifically, 1978-2012; explicitly not a claim about macro or price reform
Rival, per the author: Readings of Chinese industrial policy as indigenous planning legacy or as generic developmental-state convergence
Actual nearest rival: The reform-knowledge cluster's book-scale accounts (Weber, Gewirtz, Fewsmith), all of which narrate the same years with this channel invisible
Argumentative movement. Article-scale theorem: concept, channel, staging, generalization — one mechanism carried by one documented coalition, with the evidence concentrated in a single footnote-anchored paper trail (fn. 15) that does more work than most books' bibliographies.
Each hinge opens to its dependencies, evidence, vulnerability and concessions.
| Name | Work | N | Engagement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Komiya | Industrial Policies of Japan 1988a; 1988b in Xiandai Riben Jingji | 5 | constitutive |
| Johnson | MITI and the Japanese Miracle 1982 ('widely read in Chinese translation') | 2 | constitutive |
| Ma Hong (and Deng Liqun) | 1979 internal reports; Ma-Shimokobe 1982 | 3 | evidentiary |
| Shimokobe | joint publication with Ma Hong 1982 | 2 | evidentiary |
| Yuan and Zhang | founding of the China-Japan Economic Knowledge Exchange (Dangde wenxian 2010) | 1 | evidentiary |
| Zhang Weiying (and Cheng Xiaonong) | 1987 Japan inspection-tour article | 1 | evidentiary |
| Vogel | Deng Xiaoping 2011 | 1 | evidentiary |
| Kornai | shortage economics | — | ghost |
| Okita | Japan's chief interlocutor | — | ghost |
Positionality (acknowledgments): Harvard-Yenching working-paper circuit; Heilmann's Trier/MERICS base
Computed axes reproduce from raw fields (validate_card.py); judgment axes are rubric-anchored calls, not measurements. Cross-book comparison waits on a corpus.
Steel-man: the only member of the cluster that documents a foreign-influence channel with a paper trail — names, delegations, joint volumes, in-journal publication — and it is Japanese and bureaucratic, not Western and academic. Weakest: transmission is proven, causation inferred; and the piece never confronts the book-scale accounts that render its channel invisible, so the fight this cluster stages never happened in print.
FIRST ARTICLE-SCALE CARD: same schema, metrics scaled to ~25pp/11k words; sections stand in for chapters. Full text read via pdftotext; the fn. 15 paper trail transcribed verbatim into the dossier note. The card's role in the reform-knowledge cluster: the fourth mechanism-holder and the documentation standard the book-scale members lack. Compiled 2026-07-21, rubric v1.4.