4. China Opens

This chapter concerns itself with China’s spectacular growth, but it does so in the context of the serendipitous moment outlined above. It further contends that China’s growth in trade, production, and technical/scientific knowledge acquisition can only be fully understood within the context of the industrial transformation that was ongoing at that time. Although initially China was not a major net exporter, it was becoming a major trading nation and was therefore able to follow the East Asian developmental state model of acquiring technical and managerial knowledge through the presence of foreign companies, improvement of production processes through joint ventures, economic benefits through local content stipulations and so on.