Joyman Lee
My research deals with the intellectual debates and ideas behind the formation of Chinese industrial policy between 1920 and 1940, highlighting in particular the significance of the Japanese experience of industrialization for China. Recent works in the Japanese historiography have stressed both the extent of Chinese industrial success in the Republican period, and how Sino-Japanese interactions were a critical factor that prompted industrial ‘upgrade’ not only in China but also in Japan itself, to the extent that by the 1930s one can see clearly the emergence of an ‘Asian international economy’ with China as its second core. In this dissertation therefore I contextualize the Kuomintang government’s industrialization program in the 1930s in the broader trend towards state-led industrialization as a whole, viewing it from the perspective of Akamatsu Kaname’s famous ‘flying geese’ theory (ganko keitairon) that came to dominate Japanese policy makers’ as well as political scientists’ understanding of miracle growth in post-war East Asia.
Currently in my fifth year, I received my B.A. in History from Clare College Cambridge (First Class Honours, with Distinction), and was awarded a national Kennedy Scholarship to study in the U.S.. After spending 2009-10 to study intensive Japanese at IUC, I am completing my research in China, Japan and Taiwan. My post-candidacy work has been funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Richard U. Light Fellowship and the Yale Council on East Asian Studies. My publications include an article in History Today, and book reviews in Economic History Review, Historical Journal and Enterprise and Society.
Jonathan Spence is my advisor at Yale, and I will spend December 2011- August 2012 at the Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo to study with Sugihara Kaoru.
