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Under what conditions will the leaders of a developing economy resist dominant ideologies of modernization and development? If modernization implies maximizing GDP growth through urbanization, high-tech industry, and large-scale production, then Guizhou province in China once charted an opposing path. For more than two decades beginning in the mid-1980s, Guizhou prioritized rural-based development—investing in infrastructure and livelihood opportunities that directly benefited the rural poor. Consequently, despite posting China’s slowest GDP growth, the province achieved faster poverty reduction and rural income gains than many of its faster-growing neighbors. Yet by 2010, a new provincial regime embraced a mainstream modernization agenda centered on large-scale infrastructure and high-tech industries, especially big data. As a result, although GDP growth accelerated, poverty alleviation and rural income gains lagged, while Guizhou became China’s most indebted province. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2025, this paper analyzes the dialectical political forces and outcomes of these two divergent strategies—highlighting the trade-offs between growth-centered modernization and more inclusive, rural-based development. It then exemplifies how this “Guizhou model” has been applied in other contexts by examining cases from countries ranging from Switzerland and Scotland to Costa Rica, Colombia, Chicago, and Hong Kong

About the Speaker

John Donaldson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. His research examines politics, rural development and poverty, grounded in two decades of fieldwork in China and extended through comparative research across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. His current work focuses on cases of significant and lasting poverty reduction achieved despite limited economic growth. He is the author of Small Works: Poverty and Economic Development in Southwestern China (Cornell University Press, 2011), and his research has appeared in leading journals including World Development, China Quarterly and Journal of Development Studies. He is currently working on a book entitled, Sufficiency First: Small-Scale, Low-Tech Pathways to Human-Centered Development.