Chapter 6 studies East Asian economic growth and development strategy. It starts with a section on how economic growth and the theory of growth have been constructed. It then discusses the East Asian economic miracle – rapid growth in GDP per capita with relative equity. Most East Asian countries have chosen a hybrid path, often emulating each other and building on recent successes. Most adopted the developmental-state strategy to different degrees and at different points, and they generally view modernization as a way to regain their past glories. This chapter focuses on material wealth production, with a particular emphasis on how East Asian nations adapt and innovate. It also discusses the consequences of East Asian growth in terms of the rise and fall of nations, the “rich nation, strong army”, the contest of political systems, and the environment. Uneven economic growth is a source of a shifting balance of power.

On 9 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a port city of Japan. Sumiteru Taniguchi was sixteen at the time, delivering post about a mile from ground zero. The force of the explosion threw him from his bicycle, melting his cotton shirt and searing the skin off his back and one arm. But Taniguchi survived, one of the fortunate few who did. Many thousands in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the first city to be bombed, were not as fortunate. Japan surrendered six days later, thereby ending the Second World War.

Just like Taniguchi, who would become a lifelong advocate for the prohibition of nuclear weapons, Japan was left badly scarred after the war. But to understand the extent of the devastation, it helps to briefly discuss what came before the Second World War.

The introduction first provides the general background and motivation for the book. Catching up to America was an explicit development goal for China set by Mao Zedong in the 1950s. But Mao’s approach to economic development ended in disaster. Since 1978 when Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform, China has experienced arguably the most rapid economic rise in world history. The introduction then raises the main questions to be addressed in the book. What has led to China’s rapid economic rise? When may China overtake the United States to become the largest economy? Is there a China model of development that can be emulated by other developing countries? Why is China’s economy slowing down? Will deteriorating US–China relations slow it down even further? The introduction then points out that the real puzzle with Chinese growth is not why China has grown faster than all developed countries, but why it has grown so much faster than other low- and middle-income developing countries. Next, it lays out the content and structure of the book chapter by chapter. Lastly, it describes the global comparative perspective the book has adopted in its analysis of China’s economic rise.

In contrast to a widespread view that wealth creation is only a productive process followed by the distribution of wealth, the chapter emphasizes that the generation of wealth includes a distributive dimension, which permeates all of its stages from the preconditions to the generation process, the outcome and the use for and allocation within consumption and investment. The productive and the distributive dimension are inseparably connected. The chapter highlights the importance of the distributive dimension by briefly reviewing three important books on inequality: Piketty (2014), Stiglitz (2012) and Wilkinson & Pickett (2009). The eight High-Performing Asian Economies (Japan, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) created “The East Asian Miracle” from 1960 to 1990 and can illustrate how the productive and distributive dimensions of economic growth are closely interconnected.