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Japan's rapid post-war economic growth prompted Chinese leaders to look to their neighbour as they initiated market reforms from the late 1970s. How did movements of people and ideas between China and Japan occur, and what were their effects on Chinese enterprise policies? From the 1970s through the 1990s, Chinese officials, scholars, and enterprise representatives invited Japanese advisors to China, conducted myriad exchanges through associations like the Sino-Japanese Economic Knowledge Exchange and the Japan-China Economic Association, and actively studied Japan's economy and companies. Chinese policy-makers gained insights from Japan about market-responsive forms of corporate structure, organisational solutions to state ownership dilemmas, evidence that consolidation could aid economic performance and technological upgrading, and strategic commitment to building large state-owned enterprise groups. However, this episode of intense engagement between China and Japan generated neither unilateral 'diffusion' nor unitary influence. Instead, it reveals how China has developed its own path of economic development through what I term 'policy collaging': seeking, selecting, and creatively combining policy ideas and practices from international sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the coming to power of Kim Jong Un in 2012, the North Korean government has recently announced, and to some degree has implemented, a new set of economic management policies known as the June 28th measures in 2012 and the May 30th measures in 2014. Both of these sets of measures seek to build upon the abandoned reforms of the early 2000s through restructuring North Korea's highly inefficient collective farm and state-owned enterprise management system. In addition, the government has intensified ongoing efforts at building special economic zones for the purpose of attracting foreign investment. As such, the country is attempting to emulate the reforms adopted by China in the late 1970s. Although the success of these efforts is by no means guaranteed, they do serve to question mainstream analyses that suggest thatJucheSelf-Reliance or Sŏn'gun Military First Politics ideologies will inhibit any genuine attempt at economic reform in North Korea. We argue, in contrast, that ongoing changes to North Korean state and society mean that, a cyclical stop and start rhythm to the reforms notwithstanding, such attempts at economic reform are likely to continue. However, we also argue that while the contemporary reform drive resembles and may indeed reproduce some of the successes of the Chinese experience, North Korea faces significantly greater challenges, including the greater decline of North Korean industry, local resistance to reform, and the dangers of inflation. Furthermore, North Korea faces a highly challenging external security environment that undermines the ability of the regime to attract investment and by extension the political standing of reformist elements within the country. Given this contrast with the international environment surrounding China's own reform experience, our analysis emphasises the importance of geopolitical context in shaping experiences of economic reform and of development more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]