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Abstract: China twice missed the opportunities of industrial revolution during the late Qing Dynasty, and fell behind Japan both in economic growth and modernization level. Faced with the historic opportunity of the third industrial revolution, China seized the first window of opportunity through opening-up and reform. However, how to seize the second window of opportunity provided by the new technological revolution to catch up in technologies and industries becomes the key issue for China in upgrading China s economy and transitioning from "made in China " to "intelligent manufacturing in China. " Based on theoretical models and numerical simulations, this paper summarizes and analyzes the different industrial and technological evolutionary patterns of China during the Modernization Movement in the Qing Dynasty and Japan during the Meiji Restoration. The main finding of this paper is that an economy can only expand its overall products in the most convenient way and maximize economic surplus when it chooses the appropriate technology which suites its own factor endowments for production. This implies that governments of late developing countries should focus on the structural upgrade of their factor endowments instead of purely pursuing advanced industries and technologies.
Keywords: appropriate technology, modernization, development strategy
JEL Classification: N15, 025
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
1. Introduction of the Research Question
Since the mid-19th century, under the influence of Western industrial civilization, the Qing Dynasty, which had implemented the "closed door" policy, gradually started its modernization process by introducing numerous exogenous technologies. By studying the history of industrial development of that period, it is not difficult to find phenomena worth analyzing. In capital-intensive industries such as mining, steel production, shipbuilding, spinning, railway transportation, and postal telecommunications, China then adopted a "whole transplant" and "total copy" strategy regarding Western capital and technologies. By contrast, in labor-intensive industries such as milling, oil manufacturing, silk reeling, textiles, and silk weaving, technological upgrading went through a "stone milling + steam engine", which was a long and complicated transit process, onto a gradual reforming route (Peng, 2002).' Some scholars categorize this typical evolution of industries as "dualistic technological progress" (Dai & Li, 2009). By comparing other latecomers' history of industrial evolution, we find that Japan in its Meiji Restoration, Egypt in its Farouk era, and numerous...