Book Project

Developmental Statecraft: Firms, Bureaucracy, and Frictions in China’s Global Development

What is the role of the state in shaping economic development—not only within national borders, but across them? My book explores this question by developing the concept of developmental statecraft: a form of internationally oriented state action that seeks to remake global economic structures in line with a country’s developmental priorities.

The concept is grounded in China’s evolving global engagements. Long viewed as a case of state-led development, China has extended its interventionist logic beyond its borders, especially since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). No longer content to “fit into” the world economy, China now seeks to reshape it—by projecting planning, finance, infrastructure, and industrial policy into the Global South.

This project makes two key interventions. First, it challenges the boundaries of traditional development studies, which have largely viewed development as a domestic process and global structures as external constraints. Second, it reorients the study of economic statecraft away from transactional logics (sanctions, inducements) and toward structural, long-term strategies aimed at shifting the global distribution of production, capital, and governance power.

Through fieldwork in China and Pakistan, historical tracing of state-owned enterprises, and institutional analysis of Chinese planning agencies, the book explains how China is building a globally active developmental state—one that mobilizes firms, bureaucracy, and finance to pursue strategic transformation abroad. It also examines the contradictions, frictions, and adaptations that emerge when China’s domestic institutions are exported to foreign contexts.

Key questions include:

• How do China’s domestic developmental needs and institutional legacies shape its global engagements?
• What bureaucratic and corporate capacities underpin China’s role as a global development actor?
• How do China’s developmental and diplomatic agendas reinforce—or undermine—each other?

By developing the concept of developmental statecraft, this book offers a new way of understanding China’s rise and a new framework for theorizing global development beyond the Western aid architecture.