Temporality and Development; the Role of “Historical Proper Moment” in China’s Economic Leap

Abstract

China has undergone a great transformation in the global economic scene. Only as late as 1978, China was languishing based on the world economic pyramid. Nowadays, it rules the roost (excluding the US) just after three decades. Three approaches have been applied to explain this astronomical rise including agential, structural, and institutional approaches. These approaches give important insights into it for any careful viewer, although each one explains only one piece of this great puzzle; in fact, as this paper demonstrates, it is not the presence or absence of institutional, structural, and agential contributors, but their ‘temporality’ or conjuncture that have shaped the destiny and quiddity of China’s economic transformation. This paper, while drawing upon all three approaches, employs process tracing to show that Chinese transformation has been nourished by timely conjuncture of all three factors in the three layers of long-term, middle-term, and short-term time. We also show that attentiveness to this missing link, i. e. temporality, especially in development studies, can help us, at once, to go beyond linear and teleological time and to grasp the opportunities and challenges of transformation in time.

Keywords

• temporality
• historical proper moment
• leadership
• economic leap
• china