The literature on developmental states has mainly focused on the roles and capacities of the state in promoting industrialization in backward economies. Tuong Vu goes further to ask why some states can be developmental, while others cannot. His research explores the historical origins of developmental states, an important yet understudied issue. Vu argues that the defining features of developmental states are their cohesive state structures, including a centralized institution, cohesive political organizations, a growth-conducive state–society relationship, and ideological congruence among elites. This concentration on state structures rather than pro-growth policies leads Vu to include socialist states such as Maoist China in the category of developmental states.
However, such a definition of a developmental state is misleading and unnecessary. It is misleading because in the existing literature on developmental state, the core feature is the making of long-term industrial investment policies by technocrats, who are often well connected with industrialists, with an aim to encourage capital formation in sectors strategic to modern economic growth. Such a “plan-rational” state is vastly different from the anti-intellectualism and decentralized industrial investment that prevailed in Maoist China during the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). It is unnecessary because even without redefining developmental states, Vu can still address his central question: why did cohesive state structures appear in South Korea, Suharto's Indonesia, and Maoist China, but not in 1930s Republican China, Sukarno's Indonesia, or Vietnam?
Vu explains the variation in state structures in these four countries by examining the state formation dynamics. In each case, a “critical juncture” started with the sudden collapse of empire and the existence of different colonial or semicolonial legacies. The political factors in these dynamics are elite alignment patterns (unity, fragmentation, compromise, and polarization), and the sociological factors are elite–mass interactions (mass incorporation, mass suppression, and controlled mobilization). During the process of state formation with a multiplicity of possible outcomes, historical events significantly affect the results of state structure.
For example, the Korean War decisively determined the outcomes of the confrontation between Communists and conservatives in South Korea by excluding the former from state politics. This led to elite unity and mass suppression, and thence the emergence of a cohesive state structure by 1960. This state structure became a solid basis for the implementation of developmental economic policies under the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–79). Vu underlines the continuity in state formation between the Park and the earlier Syngman Rhee regime, an insight neglected in previous scholarship. Moreover, Vu's theory nicely accounts for the timing of the adoption of developmental policies in South Korea, which cannot be adequately accounted for by the Japanese colonial legacy. Likewise, the organization and mobilization capacities developed by the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war not only helped it defeat the Nationalists, but also enabled it to achieve a controlled mobilization of peasants and workers. The cohesive state structure of the People's Republic of China after 1949 contrasted sharply with the Republican Chinese state that had been troubled by elite fragmentation.
As “negative cases” in Vu's comparative historical analysis, post–World War II state formation in Vietnam and Indonesia is characterized by elite compromise in their respective historical circumstances. In Indonesia, the power balance among multiple local militias and loosely organized political parties was not conducive to building a centralized state. The weak state under Sukarno had to legitimize itself by incorporating various social groups into state politics, including parties that were hostile to foreign capital and big business. A decentralized political system and mass incorporation undermined the government developmental policies initiated in the 1950s. The Cold War in Southeast Asia then gave birth to the Suharto regime, which built up a more cohesive state structure by excluding domestic opponents and brutally suppressing the Indonesian Communist and labor movements. In Vietnam, independence was marked by compromise between the Communists and French-educated elite bureaucrats. Moreover, the weak state, which had not yet received massive aid from the Soviet Union and China, had to incorporate various local power groups that popped up after the surrender of Japan in 1945. Such a state structure seriously restricted the ability of the Vietnamese Communists to fundamentally reform society. As a result, the land reform in Vietnam was far less radical and brutal than that in Communist China.
The multiple patterns of elite alignment and elite–mass engagement that Vu demonstrates nicely capture the role of politics in the dynamic process of state formation. Nonetheless, Vu overstates the role of ideology congruence as an independent cause of building a cohesive state structure. Rather, ideology congruence is a result of powerful centralized state. In the particular authoritarian states examined here, incongruence in elite ideology does not necessarily undermine the cohesiveness of state structure, as attested by the economic growth in post-1978 China despite clear contradictions between the socialist ideology and the market-oriented reforms. That being said, Vu's examination of the historical origins of cohesive state structures takes seriously the historical process of state formation that is full of contingency and multiple possibilities, and thus he avoids the common pitfall of historical determinism. This is an important contribution to the literature of state formation, if not the literature of developmental states.
