Chapter 14 explores how this debate over supermarket power has manifested itself in China, where disputes between large retailers and suppliers regularly occur and have been at the core of legal developments. In this country, the supply of commodities generally exceeds demand which, in turns, leads retail channels, especially those provided by well-known large retailers, to effectively become scarce but valuable resources. Furthermore, the combination of the majority of small and/or medium-sized suppliers in China operating on a small-scale, the fact that they are scattered throughout the nation and the high degree of homogeneity between the products they provide has resulted in fierce competition among suppliers. Due to such factors, it is difficult for suppliers to form a coalition capable of successfully bargaining with large retailers. Also these factors currently permit large retailers to enjoy positions of market power; commonly they enjoy a comparatively advantageous position over that of suppliers, which they abuse in order to bully suppliers into submission. To combat this issue, China has introduced legislation and regulation. However, due to the lack of clarity concerning the interplay between different laws and regulations, there are challenges inherent in their practical application.

In chapter four, we examine the North Korean regime’s attempts to overcome its secular economic decline through the opening of trade relations with the West in the 1970s. As elsewhere in the socialist bloc, declining growth rates and superpower detente led to growing engagement with the West. However, the collapse of raw material prices in the 1970s and North Korea’s failure to export its manufactures made it increasingly difficult for the country to service its debts and, as a result, Pyongyang defaulted in the mid-1970s. Locked out of world capital markets, North Korea made some attempts to attract FDI investment in the 1980s, though these attempts were limited and largely unsuccessful. As a result of a poor investment climate and continued geopolitical instability, North Korea became increasingly reliant on aid from the Soviet Union and China. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the pragmatic shift in China’s foreign economic policy in the early 1990s immediately exposed North Korea’s excessive reliance on cheap energy imports. The earlier “privileges of backwardness” possessed by North Korea thus quickly became a curse, leading to economic collapse and to mass famine. North Korea’s strong developmental nationalism along with the almost complete elimination of civil society meant instead that the country’s socio-political system was relatively impervious to the transformations elsewhere in the socialist world between 1989 and 1991.

This introduction sets forth the puzzle of North Korean development trajectory, namely its initial successes, its collapse in the 1990s, and its subsequent recovery since then. It engages with existing theories of development and with the critique of methodological nationalism in the field of Development Studies and International Political Economy. It argues that liberal economic and dependency theory fail to account for the specificity of the country’s experience, or indeed projects of national development in general. We put forward an alternative framework of the ‘development-geopolitics nexus’ through a reinterpretation of the global history of national development, examining three geopolitical moments that have shaped that history, namely colonialism, the Cold War, and the rise of China. The discussion of the legacies of colonialism sheds light on the emergence of developmental nationalisms in the (post)colonial world and how the material legacies of colonialism aided or hindered post-colonial development; the analysis of the Cold War sheds light on how the US and the USSR sought to facilitate late development within their respective spheres of influence; the analysis of the rise of China examines the extent to which China’s influence can be said to reflect a process of neo-colonialism or win-win mutual benefit.