HIAS-E-51

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence:State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Mark Koyama
Department of Economics, George Mason University

Chiaki Moriguchi
The Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Tuan-Hwee Sng

Department of Economics, National University of Singapore July 2017

Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University
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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence:State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Mark Koyama, Chiaki Moriguchi, Tuan-Hwee Sng∗
July 2017

Abstract
We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of politicaldevelopment in China and Japan during the late nineteenth century. The arrivalof Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, butalso fundamentally threatened the sovereignty of both countries. These threats
and opportunities produce an unambiguous impetus toward centralization andmodernization for small states, but place conflicting demands on larger states.
We use our theory to study why China, which had been centralized for much ofits history, experienced gradual disintegration upon the Western arrival, and how
Japan rapidly unified and modernized.
Keywords: China; Japan; Geopolitics; State Capacity; Political Fragmentation; PoliticalCentralization; Economic Modernization∗
Mark Koyama, Department of Economics, George Mason University. Email: mkoyama2@gmu.edu. Chiaki
Moriguchi, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. Email: chiaki@ier.hit-u.ac.jp. Tuan-Hwee
Sng, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore. Email: tsng@nus.edu.sg. We are gratefulfor comments from Tyler Cowen, Nathan Nunn, Jack Paine, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Noam Yuchtman, andparticipants at the 2015 World Economic History Congress in Kyoto, the Frontiers in Chinese Economic History
Conference in Berkeley, the CUHK 6th Annual Conference on Chinese Economy, George Mason Economic
History and Development Workshop, and the 2016 NBER Japan project meeting. Pei Zhi Chia provided valuable
research support. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from Hitotsubashi University IER Joint Usageand Research Center Grant (FY2016) and Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1(FY2014-FRC3-002).

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

1

Introduction

We investigate the process of state building and economic modernization through a comparative
study from Asia: why did Japan successfully build a modern state in the late nineteenth century,
while China did not? Both China and Japan came under increasing threat from the Western
powers during the nineteenth century. This was a “critical juncture” for both economies, to use
the terminology of Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). In response, Japan undertook a program ofstate building and modernization; in China, however, a more limited attempt to modernize thestate proved unsuccessful and the power of the central state was weakened. This transformation
set the stage for nearly a century of political turmoil in China, and the onset of sustained
economic growth in Japan.
The divergence between China and Japan after 1850 poses a potential conundrum to theeconomic history and political economy scholarship.1 It is puzzling, first of all, from theperspective of the large literature that stresses the importance of external wars as engines ofstate building: both China and Japan were confronted with external threats in the second part of
the nineteenth century, but only Japan embarked on a comprehensive program of modernization.
Second, the dichotomous outcome we observe is at odds with what one might expect froma superficial assessment of the internal political histories of the two countries. China had alonger history of continuous statehood (Fukuyama, 2011) and the Qing state in 1800 was more
centralized than was Tokugawa Japan. A third reason to revisit this particular case study is thatthe initial East Asian divergence in state building was not driven by internal conditions such as
the pressures of industrialization as in variants of the modernization hypothesis (Lipset, 1963) orby the threat of democracy as modeled by Acemoglu and Robinson (2001), but was rather a
response to radical changes in the external environment brought forth by the rise of the West.
To address this puzzle we develop a unified framework to study how states manage the twingoals of defense and development—when these goals are complementary and when are theyin conflict? To illustrate the utility of the framework, we use it to account for China’s andJapan’s diverging paths of political development and for the diﬀerence in their attitudes toward
broad-based reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Our main contribution is to the literature on the role of institutions in long-run growth andeconomic history (e.g., North, 1981, 1990; North et al., 2009; Acemoglu et al., 2005). In recent
years, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of states being both eﬀective inproviding basic public goods and strong enough to prevent rent-seeking interests from vetoing1

For conciseness, we use “1850” to represent the time point at which the break between premodern andmodern eras occurred in China and Japan. Therefore, post-1850 represents the period after the First Opium War(1839–42) in China and the period after the Black Ship Incident (1853) in Japan.

1Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
pro-growth policies (North et al., 2009; Besley and Persson, 2011; Hoﬀman, 2015a).2 We study
the problem of state building in the context of a hostile external environment to oﬀer a novel
understanding of why external threats could encourage the rise of a strong and eﬀective state insome instances but not in others.
The second novel feature of our analysis is that we highlight the spatial dimension of statebuilding. The literature on state capacity usually treats state building as a spatially uniform
process: state capacity, once built, applies uniformly throughout the country.3 But clearly, thestate is not omnipresent—by default, it will be more eﬀective in some locations (e.g., in andaround the capital city) than in others (e.g., in peripheral regions). This makes maintaining
eﬀective control a more complicated task in a large state than in a small one, which, in turn, has
implications on their respective abilities and willingness to pursue socioeconomic reforms.
Thirdly, the seminal contributions in this literature have thus far focused on Western Europe(e.g., North and Weingast, 1989; North et al., 2009; Dincecco, 2009; Dincecco and Katz, 2014). It
is only recently that scholars have considered the process of state formation and modernizationin other parts of the world such as Latin America (Arias, 2013) or East Asia (Slater, 2010; Vu,
2010; He, 2013; Paik and Vechbanyongratana, 2017). While there is an extensive literature on
the developmental state in East Asia (e.g., Haggard et al., 1997; Doner et al., 2005), it focuseslargely on the post-1945 experience instead of on the original point of divergence in state buildingthat took place in the nineteenth century as this paper does.
The conventional wisdom emphasizes Meiji Japan’s eagerness and commitment to emulate
the West in implementing broad-based reforms and the lack thereof in China as a key ingredientof their post-1850 divergence (Fairbank and Reischauer, 1989; Paine, 2003; Ma, 2004).4 Less wellknown is the fact that like China, Japan, too, experienced considerable popular resistance towardreform, but it overcame the resistance through resolute state policy (Aoki, 1971; Tanaka, 2004).
Hence, we argue that the observed diﬀerences in reform attitude between the two countries were
not exogenously formed. Instead, they were, at least in part, shaped by the interaction of external
challenges and domestic constraints in the two economies. In the spirit of the scholarship thathighlights the role of war in state building (Tilly, 1990; Hoﬀman, 2015b; Gennaioli and Voth,
2015) and work that emphasizes how the size of a polity determines its economic policies (Alesina
and Spolaore, 2003; Rosenthal and Wong, 2011), we build a model in which the respective needs
2

Recent surveys are provided by Dincecco (2015) and Johnson and Koyama (2017).
The only exception that we are aware of is Acemoglu et al. (2015), who study subnational variations in state
capacity in Colombia. Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2014) provide evidence that in many African countries
the reach of central government does not extend into the periphery where ethnic level institutions have a greater
impact on developmental outcomes than national institutions. The implications of polity size for fiscal capacity
in Qing China are also considered by Sng (2014) and Ma and Rubin (2017).
4
As Mokyr (1990, 231) put it, “Japan adopted European technology rapidly lock, stock, and barrel, while
China tried for decades to import European arms while preserving its old social and economic institutions”.
32

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
to deal with external threats and provide domestic order interact to influence the incentives andactions of policymakers. We use the model to explain (1) the political status quo in China andJapan (centralization in China and decentralization in Japan) before the mid-nineteenth century;(2) why China moved toward decentralization while Japan became politically centralized upon
the arrival of Western powers; and (3) why despite considerable societal resistance to reformin both countries, ruling elites in Japan pushed forward with comprehensive reform while theChinese leadership displayed ambivalence and was reluctant to change. While we focus on thepolitical economy dimensions of the decision to modernize or not, our analysis complements otherrecent work that emphasizes the cultural and ideological determinants of the success of Meiji
Japan and comparative failure of late Qing China (see, for instance, Iyigun and Rubin, 2017).
Our analysis draws attention to the relative size of China and Japan in shaping their
institutional responses to the threats that they faced in the late nineteenth century. We buildon the Hotelling-style linear city model employed in Ko, Koyama, and Sng (2014) to study how
geopolitics generate systematic tendencies toward state centralization or state decentralization.
It predicts that a singular external threat, such as the historical threat posed by the steppe
nomads along China’s northern frontier, generates a systematic tendency toward centralization.
However, powerful threats from multiple fronts have a diﬀerential impact on states of diﬀerent
sizes. The weakest states would collapse while other small states would seek centralization(resource pooling) and reform (resource augmentation) to cope with the threats. But for large
states that are handicapped more by organizational diseconomies of scale than by resource
constraint, the threats can lead to the decentralization of political authority and a weaker desire
for reform.
The point we emphasize is that to the rest of the world, the rise of the West brought not only
opportunities to adopt radically new technologies and practices (such as steam engines, railroads,
and public education), but also powerful threats to national sovereignty. These geopoliticalthreats endangered the survival of the smallest states with the least resources most, whilelarge states faced great costs of implementing reforms to adopt the new technologies due toorganizational complexities. By comparison, states in the middle of the spectrum, like Japan,
were most incentivized to embark on a program of centralization and modernization.
For China, traditionally a land-based continental empire with a stronger military-politicalestablishment in the north than in the south, the rise of European naval power demanded urgent
actions to bolster coastal defense and strengthening the presence of the state in South China, at
a time when it was facing renewed pressure along its Inner Asian land frontier from the Russians(Liu and Smith, 1980). The ineﬃciency of coordinating the twin responses from a single centeron the one hand, and the central authority’s unwillingness to concede too much autonomy to the3Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
provinces on the other contributed to the Qing dynasty’s wavering between centralization anddecentralization from the mid-nineteenth century through until the dynasty’s collapse in 1912.
Our model further highlights that for a large state, the goals of defense and development
are not congruent. To take full advantage of the new economic and technological possibilities,
a large state like China needs to decentralize and allow provincial authorities to take the leadin implementing initiatives such as building schools and roads that serve local needs. However,decentralization may generate collective action problems in defense and diplomacy. Here again,
the rise of the West meant that Chinese policymakers were confronted with conflicting objectives.
Dealing with the challenge of the West was not easy for Japan either. Like the leadersof Qing China, the political leadership in Japan reacted to the mid-nineteenth century crisis
under huge uncertainty (Jansen, 2000; He, 2013). But as an island state, Japan’s national andlocal objectives of security and reform were broadly complementary; the contradiction between
political centralization and local state building did not exist. Hence, it took less time for theJapanese leaders to reach a consensus over what had to be done politically to confront the
mid-nineteenth century crisis: the feudal system of the Tokugawa period had to be replaced bya centralized government so that Japan could pool its relatively limited resources to mount acoordinated response to the threat of Western imperialism.
Our analysis does not only shed light on the diverging developments in China and Japan.
It also illuminates the loss of sovereignty to small East Asian states such as Korea, Sulu, andVietnam during the same period and the demise of large empires including Tsarist Russia andOttoman Turkey in the early twentieth century. To further derive generalizable insights from ourframework, we also highlight the parallels between our cases and an earlier historical episode: theninth-century unification of Anglo-Saxon England and fragmentation of the Carolingian empire.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we first provide the historicalbackground on nineteenth-century East Asia to derive the observations to be explained byour model, presented in Section 3. In Section 4, we discuss how our theory sheds light on
the divergence between China and Japan after 1850. We then discuss the application of ourframework on other episodes of state formation and fragmentation as well as potential limitations
and extensions in Section 5. Section 6 concludes.

2

The Puzzle: State Centralization andModernization in East Asia

Why did the emergence of geopolitical threats from the West in the second half of the nineteenth
century have diﬀerential eﬀects on state building in diﬀerent parts of East Asia? The existing4

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Figure 1(a) Traditionally, the Chinese state had a stronger pres- (b) From the mid-1800s to its collapse in 1912, the Qing
ence in the north than in the south as reflected in the state faced foreign encroachment by land (from Inner
distribution of the counties. Source: CHGIS (2007).
Asia) and by sea (from the sea).

literature points out that external threats and war can encourage investments in state building
but it does not explain how the same set of geopolitical threats can have a diﬀerent impact indiﬀerent countries. In this section we outline the geopolitical situation facing China and Japanin the nineteenth century and how they responded to the new challenges posed by the West.
Before 1850, the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) ruled a large empire stretching across 14 million
square kilometers. Despite its territorial size, political authority was concentrated in the hands ofthe emperor who ruled through a centralized bureaucracy that had a stronger presence in North
China than in South China (Figure 1a). Oﬃcials were recruited via imperial examination andselection was meritocratic. There was no hereditary nobility and no separation of social classes(Fairbank, 1992). In comparison to Tokugawa Japan, China had a long legacy of organizedrule by a central government. It should have been easier for China to maintain a centralized
system of government than it was for Japan to build one as Asia transitioned into the modern
era. Nevertheless, this was not what occurred.

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Table 1: Timeline for late Qing China

Year

Event

Description

1839–42
1850–64
1856–60
1858
1861–95
1894–95
1899–1901
1901–12Opium War
Taiping Rebellion
Second Opium War
Treaty of Aigun
Self-Strengthening Movement
Sino-Japanese War
Boxer Rebellion
New Policies Unveiled

1911–12Chinese Revolution

China cedes Hong Kong to Britain.
Peasant uprising sweeps southern China.
Anglo-French expedition defeats Qing Army.
China cedes 600,000 km2 to Russia.
China launches limited reforms.
China cedes Taiwan and pays huge indemnity.
Eight-Nation Alliance invaded North China.
Qing court announces Meiji-style political,
economic, military, and educational reforms.
Provinces take opportunity of mutiny inWuchang to declare independence.

2.1 External Threats and State Disintegration in Qing China
A large existing literature links China’s long tradition of political centralization to the recurring
geopolitical threat that it faced from the Eurasian steppe (Barfield, 1989; Turchin, 2009). Prior
to the Opium Wars, all major invasions of China came via the north. This changed drasticallyafter the First Opium War (1839–42). China’s defeat in the hands of Britain meant that theWestern powers now posed a direct threat to China’s coast. The Treaty of Nanking, signed in
1842 to restore peace, saw the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony and the openingof Shanghai and other Chinese ports to foreign trade and residence. It was followed by a seriesof “unequal treaties” that committed China to grant extraterritorial rights and give up tariﬀ
autonomy to the Western powers. Table 1 summarizes the chronology of these events.
Besides confronting unprecedented naval threats from the sea, China also had to deal withsteady encroachment by Russia, who had by now replaced the steppe nomads as China’s mainthreat along its north-west land frontier. In 1858, when fighting a joint Anglo-French invasion,
China ceded its territories north of the Amur River to Russia to avoid fighting a two-front war(Figure 1b). Further Russian encroachment precipitated what historians referred to as “the great
policy debate of 1874,” which saw senior Chinese statesmen in disagreement over whether China
should place its defense priority on its land or maritime frontiers (Liu and Smith, 1980).55The contemporaneous Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine observed in its July 1852 issue that China wasincreasingly sandwiched between foreign pressures along its north-west frontier and along its south-east coast. On
the one hand, “Russia, the great nascent power of the Old World, has rolled her armies across Siberia up to thefoot of the Great Wall, and now casts a covetous eye upon the northern portion of the Celestial Empire”. On theother hand, “Britain [...] has reached with her fleets every harbour of the Flowery Land” (113).

6

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
The geopolitical changes coincided with a shift toward limited political decentralization within
China, which first took place in the 1850s to provide a more flexible and responsive approach tocounter the Taiping Rebellion (Kuhn, 1980). Apart from allowing provincial scholar-generals
to raise their own armies, the imperial court also granted them more fiscal autonomy (Shi andXu, 2008). After the rebels were put down, political decentralization was partially but not fullyrolled back as the provinces continued to enjoy substantial autonomy on fiscal and administrative
matters.6 To deal with the rising Western threat, the imperial court permitted some provincial
appointment holders to undertake greater responsibilities in foreign aﬀairs. In particular, theviceroy of Zhili province was entrusted with the responsibilities of coordinating defense mattersin the coastal provinces and dealing with the Western powers (Chu and Liu, 1994).
The Qing state also initiated the Self Strengthening Movement in the 1860s. Some of its
more significant endeavors include: setting up foreign language schools in Beijing, Shanghai,
and Guangzhou to build foreign aﬀairs expertise and to translate Western works of science andtechnology; opening new mines and constructing iron foundries, steel mills, machine factories,
arsenals, and shipyards; the establishment of military and naval academies; creating new industries
and enterprises including railway and telegraph lines, cotton-spinning and weaving companies,
and steam navigation companies.
Its achievements notwithstanding, the Self Strengthening Movement was largely confined tothe adoption of Western military technology and armaments. It was significantly less ambitious
in agenda and limited in terms of its social and economic impact when compared with Japan’s
Meiji Restoration, where reforms went beyond military modernization and involved, among otherthings, an overhaul of the land ownership system, the introduction of compulsory education,and state-led investment on a nationwide rail transport network (Jansen, 2000). As Figure 2
illustrates, China lagged behind Japan in railroad construction in the run-up to the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894–5. In the construction of telegraph lines, setting up of post oﬃces, and use of
steamships too, China was overshadowed by its eastern neighbor (Li, 2008).7
A major impediment to reform in late-Qing China was the significant disagreement within
the political leadership. Reformers in the government were often attacked and labeled as traitorsand sycophants by conservative and hardline oﬃcials, who argued against the need for China tochange its institutions and practices (Hao and Wang, 1980).
The general public, too, displayed significant resentment toward what they perceived as
foreign encroachment on China (Baark, 1997; Rowe, 2009). Anti-missionary riots and assaults
6

For quantitative evidence, see Shi (2009, 59).
Moreover, even the achievements of the Self Strengthening Movement such as the Fuzhou Shipyard wasundermined by the absence of a centralized fiscal system and reliance on ad hoc local financing arrangements as
documented by Pong (1987).
7

7

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Figure 2: Railroad construction in Qing China and Meiji Japan

Source: Jin and Xu (1986); Tang (2013).

occurred periodically and received support from the gentry and commoners, who viewed themissionaries and hitherto unknown technologies such as telegraphs and railways with grave
suspicion.8 China’s first operational railway, the 14.5-kilometer Wusong Railway, was torn downin 1877 amid unrest among the local population (Wang, 2015).
After China’s comprehensive defeat at the hands of Japan in 1894–95, its political leadershipbegan to contemplate a major overhaul of the existing institutions (Hao and Wang, 1980). In theearly 1900s, the imperial court announced Meiji-style reforms in government, military, education,and other areas. However, the dynasty collapsed in 1912 after a mutiny in Wuchang triggered achain of events that caused the provinces to declare their independence from Beijing.
2.2 From Tokugawa to Meiji Japan
During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Japanese society was organized into four hereditaryclasses of samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants. The emperor was merely a figurehead while
the shogun, the most powerful lord in Japan, ruled only 15% of the country directly (Figure 3).
The bulk of the remaining country was territorially divided into some 260 domains, each headed
by a local lord (daimyo).
Most of these domains were very small. In the 1860s, 166 out of the 266 domains had

8

Wright (1957, 274) observed that “Christianity in the 1860’s was attacked not [...] by oﬃcials, but by the
populace and non-oﬃce-holding lower literati; it was menaced not be proscription but by mob riots.”8Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Figure 3: Japan before the Meiji Unification.

DomainAnnual Output (koku)

Shogunate
Kaga
ChoshuSatsumaKumamoto
Owari
Saga
Fukuoka
Kii
Tosa

4,000,000
1,350,000
990,000
870,000
790,000
780,000
720,000
570,000
540,000
500,000

Notes: (i) Data source: Hansei ichiran. Map adapted fromhttp://www.fas.harvard.edu/⇠chgis/japan/; (ii) Output of
Shogunate based on oﬃcial estimate, others are actual outputs in 1869; (iii) Anti-Shogunate coalition in bold.

(b) Largest domains by output(a) Adversaries of Boshin War

annual outputs below 50,000 koku.9 By comparison, the Shogunate was rated at 4 million koku.
However, there were eighteen sizable local domains. Their lords were regarded as “province
holders” (kunimochi daimyo) by contemporaries and behaved “more like sovereigns than likevassals” (Ravina, 1999, 21). Four of these domains—Satsuma, Choshu, Saga, and Tosa—would
form the coalition that overthrew the Shogunate in 1868 (Figure 3b).
Before the late Tokugawa period, the Shogunate was able to maintain a monopoly over foreign
and inter-domain aﬀairs. However, there was no central treasury in Tokugawa Japan, nor was
there a central army (Jansen, 2000). The Shogunate had no right to tax other domains andthe local domains maintained their own administrators, armies, tax systems, and legal codes(Totman, 1993). Many domains issued their own paper monies or copper cash. The absence offiscal and military institutions at the national level and the autonomy of local domains implies
that Tokugawa Japan was fiscally and militarily fragmented. If we accept Max Weber’s definitionof a modern state as an entity claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence, Tokugawa Japan was
not a single state but comprised a league of smaller political entities (Weber, 1968).10
Due to fear of foreign influence, the Shogunate outlawed Christianity and banned Japanese
9Japanese domains were measured in terms of economic output instead of land area. One koku is equivalent
to 180.4 liters of rice, historically interpreted as the amount required to feed a person for a year.
10
See Sng and Moriguchi (2014) for a similar argument. Further support of this interpretation comes from thetheory of the firm, which equates ownership with the control of residual rights to assets (Grossman and Hart,
1986). Since a daimyo was the residual claimant to the fiscal resources of his domain, he, not the shogun, owned
the domain.

9

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Table 2: Timeline for Major Events in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan

Year

Event

Description

1853

Black Ships Incident

1862

Namamugi Incident

1864

Shimonoseki Campaign

1868

Meiji Restoration

1871–73

Reform accelerates

1877
1894–95

Satsuma Rebellion
Sino-Japanese War

American ships arrive oﬀ coast of Japan and demands the opening of Japan.
Satsuma’s assault on British nationals results inbombardment of its capital Kagoshima.
British, French, Dutch, and American ships bombard
Choshu.
Tokugawa forces defeated in civil war; AntiShogunate coalition forms government.
Introduction of new currency system, land tax, public education, and universal conscription.
80,000 disaﬀected samurai revolt against reforms.
Japan defeats the Chinese army and navy.

ships from traveling abroad. Only Chinese and Dutch ships were permitted to enter Nagasaki,
the sole major port open to foreign trade before 1858. As geopolitical threats were relatively
subdued, the seclusion policy was enforced with relative ease until the 1850s.
Things changed radically in the mid-nineteenth century after a small British expeditionary
force defeated China, the traditional linchpin of East Asian political order, in the Opium War(Table 2). In 1853, when a navy squadron from the United States led by Commodore Matthew
Perry sailed into Edo bay and demanded that Japan open up or risk war, the Shogunate had nochoice but to acquiesce. The event became known as the Black Ships Incident. Subsequently, in aseries of treaties signed with various Western powers, the Shogunate further accepted provisions
that obliged Japan to open its ports, give up its right to set tariﬀs on imports, and allow foreigners
to enjoy extraterritoriality in Japan (Beasley, 2000).
The Shogunate’s perceived weakness and capitulation to the demands of the foreigners led todissent among the domains. In 1868, Satsuma, Choshu, Saga, and Tosa joined forces to defeat
the Shogunate and return power to the Meiji emperor.
Although the anti-Shogunate domains adopted a patriotic, anti-West stance during thecivil war, once in power they discarded their xenophobic rhetoric and pursued a program ofWesternization that had begun during the last years of the Shogunate.11 Feudalism was abolishedas local domains were converted into prefectures.Helped by the swift formation of a genuine
11Japan’s naval modernization began in the last decade of Tokugawa rule. Likewise, the plan to construct
Japan’s first railway between Edo (Tokyo) and Yokohama was approved before the Meiji Restoration. According
to Beasley (2000, 50), the Shogunate’s reform program “was a blueprint for ‘wealth and strength’ on the lines
which the Meiji government was later to follow.”10Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
central government, reforms on land, education, monetary, and other areas were implemented ona national scale in a short span of time (Jansen, 2000).
While Japan’s political and economic transformation during the Meiji era is widely regarded
today as a textbook case of successful modernization and industrialization, it is worth notingthat like China, the general population in Japan—samurai and peasants alike—demonstrated
considerable xenophobia and resistance to reform too. In 1873–74, several peasant-led revolts
against the new land tax, public education, and conscription were brutally quelled.12 They were
followed by uprisings of samurai who resented the loss of their stipends and their right to carryswords. In 1877, the Satsuma Rebellion, the best known and the last of the post-Meiji uprisings,
was decisively suppressed.
The above historical discussion can be summarized as follows:
Observation 1 (Geopolitics): Before the mid-nineteenth century, China’s main geopoliticalchallenge came from Inner Asia, while Japan enjoyed a largely peaceful external environment. In
the second half of the nineteenth century, both countries were encroached by the Western powers.
Observation 2 (Political Structure): At the turn of the mid-nineteenth century, China
moved from political centralization toward decentralization, whereas Japan shifted from politicaldecentralization to centralization.
Observation 3 (Reform): (a) In response to the Western threat, Japan adopted comprehensive reforms from the onset while China’s reforms were limited before the 1900s; (b) The
Chinese leadership was divided over the need for reform, while the diﬀerence in attitude towardreform between the Shogunate and the anti-Tokugawa leaders was considerably smaller; (c) In
both countries, there was considerable public resistance toward reform, but in Japan the state
took resolute actions to overcome such resistance.
In the next section, we build a theoretical framework to show how geopolitics (Observation 1)
interacted with domestic constraints to shape the diﬀerent responses we observe in China andJapan (Observations 2 and 3).

3

Model

We first develop a basic model in which the authority (or ruler) administering a territory chooses
where to build state capacity and how much to build to deal with external threats (Section 3.1).
12

As in the Chinese case, ignorance and fear played an important role in these events. In Okayama, Kagawa,and Tottori prefectures, for example, the revolts were fed by rumors that the government was extracting bloodand transmitting it via the newly constructed telegraph lines to blood-drinking foreigners (Tanaka, 2004).

11

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
We show that the optimal political structure (i.e., centralization or decentralization), depends on
two factors: the size of the territory and the nature (i.e., intensity and directions) of the external
threats.
Next, we extend the model to incorporate the authority’s decision to implement reform on
top of providing national defense (Section 3.2). The extension produces the key insight that,when confronting powerful threats from multiple fronts, the diﬃculty of reconciling the two goalsof defense and development increases with the size of the territory.
Finally, we provide a simulation to demonstrate that our model produces the outcomes thatare compatible with historical developments in China and Japan (Section 3.3).
To focus on the key mechanisms of the model, we assume simple parametric forms for all
functions. However, the results do not depend on the parametric assumptions chosen. In the
Appendix, we provide a more general model without these assumptions.
3.1 Basic Model
Consider a territory represented by a line of length [0, ] with homogeneous inhabitants of mass
uniformly distributed along this line. This territory may be as small as the Japanese mainislands or as large as China east of the Himalayas and south of the Gobi desert. An inhabitantat point x 2 [0, ] is endowed with taxable income y.
This territory is a state with one or multiple autonomous political authorities. That is, theterritory is divided into S 2 N disjoint intervals, each taxed by an authority. For example, before
1850, S = 1 in China and S > 260 in Japan.
First, we analyze how resilient is a state of S authorities given the geopolitical environment.
A higher S represents greater decentralization. For ease of illustration, we assume that S can
only take the values of 1 (centralization) or 2 (decentralization). When S = 1, we refer to thesole authority as Authority c. When S = 2, we refer to the two authorities as Authority l (left)
and Authority r (right).13
We integrate geopolitical considerations into the analysis in the following way: the territory
faces exogenous geopolitical threats from outside. Such threats may be (i) non-existent, (ii)
one-sided and emanating from one frontier (at x = 0, without loss of generality), or (iii) two-sided
and emanating from both frontiers (at x = 0 and x = ).
An external threat, if realized, causes gross damage ⇤ > 0 at the frontier. If unstopped, thedamage will spread further into the territory: for a point t distance away from the frontier, thegross damage is (t) = max{⇤ ↵t, 0} where ↵ > 0 inversely measures the spillover strengthof the threat (Figures 4 and 5). We assume that military power weakens over distance and13

Restricting our focus to S  2 is innocuous. In Section 5, we discuss how relaxing it can enrich our results.

12Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

⇤l

↵t

⇤l

↵t
⇤r

t

t

0

↵t
t

0
Figure 4: A one-sided threat.

Figure 5: Two-sided (asymmetric) threats.

therefore ↵ is strictly positive. We expect ↵ to be larger in the premodern age than today due
to advancement in transportation technology and military weaponry.
Each authority collects taxes and invests in state capacity, which includes both military
and administrative infrastructures, to maintain political order. State capacity is strongest at theauthority’s political-military center, but deteriorates over distance due to constraints imposedby premodern transportation and communication technologies. Let Gi denote authority i’spolitical-military center—referred to here as i’s base. As illustrated in Figure 6, for a location t
distance away from Gi , its state capacity at the location is given by m(t) = max{Mit, 0},
where > 0 captures the deterioration of state capacity due to distance. Note the analogy
between ↵ and .
State capacity can block the external threat from spreading inland. Specifically, consider
a one-sided threat initiated at x = 0, if the state capacity of authority i at x0 is no less than
the gross damage of the external threat at that location, then x0 and any location to its right issaid to be protected (Figure 7). For authority i 2 {c, l, r} to invest Mi 0, it costs m0 + ✓Mi2 ,where m0 > 0 denotes the fixed cost of capacity building and ✓ > 0 is a scaling constant.
Authorities that do not adequately protect their populations face civil unrest. Clearly, if
unrest is suﬃciently widespread, the existing political order will collapse. To model this, we
assume that if a contiguous segment of length more than 0 < < 1 is left unprotected, thena revolution occurs and the authority that taxes the segment collapses.14 This assumption,commonly used in models of political economy, captures the observation that no government
regardless of regime type can completely ignore the welfare of its subjects, but revolutions require
sizable support to make an impact (Alesina and Spolaore, 2003).
Under political centralization (S = 1), the centralized authority c controls the entire territory
and its net tax revenue is Vc = y m0 ✓Mc2 . Under political decentralization (S = 2), we
fix the administrative border of the two local authorities at 12 . The left authority l chooses its
base location Gl 2 [0, 12 ]. The right authority r chooses its base location Gr 2 [ 12 , 1]. Theirnet revenues are Vl = 12 y m0 ✓Ml2 and Vr = 12 y m0 ✓Mr2 respectively. Endogenizing
border formation will not aﬀect our results and in the Appendix, we provide a model that allows
14This assumption generalizes but does not drive the results. Removing it is equivalent to setting

13

= 0.

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
...Mc
Mc

...Mc

t
protected against threat

t

0

0

Gc
Figure 6: An authority’s state
capacity deteriorates over distancefrom its base.

x

0

Gc

Figure 7: Authority c blocks theexternal threat at x0 so that theinterval from x0 to is protected.

authorities to compete for territory.
The optimization problems under political centralization and decentralization are as follows:
the centralized state c chooses the location of its base Gc 2 [0, 1] and invests Mc 0 to maximize
its net revenue; authorities l and r simultaneously choose their bases Gl 2 [0, 12 ] and Gr 2 [ 12 , ]and make investments Ml 0 and Mr 0 to maximize their respective net tax revenues.
We now present the solutions of the above optimization problems in the form of four
propositions, which respectively address political centralization under one-sided threat (P1) andtwo-sided threats (P2), and political decentralization under one-sided threat (P3) and two-sided
threats (P4). Subsequently, we derive two implications from these propositions to compare theresilience of political centralization and decentralization under diﬀerent threat scenarios.
Proposition 1 (Centralization, One-Sided Threat). Let ⇤ = ↵ .
When the threat is one-sided and emanates from x = 0:
A. If ⇤l  ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc 2 [ ⇤↵l , ] and makes zero investment
in state capacity;
B. If ⇤l > ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc =Mc = ⇤l ↵ .

and invests to the level

Consider a politically centralized territory under a one-sided threat. Case A states that if thethreat is trivial (i.e., it brings gross damage to no more than segment of the territory), thecentralized state will ignore it and make minimal eﬀort to build state capacity. One could argue
that Japan of the Nara period (710–784) or the Heian Period (794–1185) epitomize this case.
Case B characterizes the scenario that China confronted in the late imperial period during which
it located its capital city (Beijing), bureaucracy, and military close to the northern border todefend the steppe threat.
Next, consider a centralized state confronting two geopolitical threats. Without loss ofgenerality, assume that ⇤l > ⇤r when ⇤l 6= ⇤r .
14

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Proposition 2 (Centralization, Two-Sided Threats). Let ⇤ = ↵ .
Under threats from both x = 0 and x = :A. If ⇤l  ⇤ and ⇤r  ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc 2 [ ⇤↵l ,zero investment in state capacity;
B. If ⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤r  ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc =level Mc = ⇤l ↵ ;⇤r] and makes↵

and invests to the

C. If ⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤r > ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc = 2 + ⇤r2 ⇤l and invests
lto the level Mc = ⇤r +⇤+ 2(↵ + ) .
2
Cases A and B of Proposition 2 are analogous to Cases A and B of Proposition 1. In Case A,
both threats are trivial and the centralized state makes zero investment in state capacity. In
Case B, because the threat arising from x = is trivial, the centralized state focuses on dealing
with the threat at x = 0 only. Of particular interest is Case C, where threats on both ends ofthe territory are non-trivial. In this situation, the state locates its base close to the center of theterritory to deal with both threats simultaneously.
Moving on to political decentralization. Propositions 3 and 4 mirror Propositions 1 and 2
respectively:
Proposition 3 (Decentralization, One-Sided Threat). Let ⇤ = ↵ .
Under an external threat emanating from x = 0:
A. If ⇤l  ⇤, Authority l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; Authority r locates its base at
Gr 2 [ 12 , ]; each makes zero investment in state capacity.
B. If ⇤l > ⇤, Authority l locates its base at Gl = and invests to the level Ml = ⇤l ↵ ;Authority r locates its base at Gr 2 [ 12 , ] and makes zero investment in state capacity.
Proposition 4 (Decentralization, Two-Sided Threats). Let ⇤ = ↵ .
Under threats from both x = 0 and x = , Authority l responds in the manner specified in
Proposition 3. As for Authority r:
A. If ⇤r  ⇤, it locates its base at Gr 2 [ 12 ,⇤r
] and makes zero investment in state capacity.
↵

B. If ⇤r > ⇤, it locates its base at Gr =and invests to the level Mr = ⇤r

15

↵ .

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Mc.....Ml Mr .....

0

0 ...Gl

Gc

Figure 8: When the territory ( )is small, political centralization pools
scarce resources to deal with two-sided
threats eﬃciently.

Gr ...

Figure 9: Political fragmentation generates wastage and heightens the problem of resource scarcity in a small territory.

In Case A of Propositions 3 and 4, the threat confronting the authority is trivial and can besafely ignored. This is no longer true in Case B, and hence the local authority will locate its
base strategically and invest in state capacity to contain the threat.
With Propositions 1–4, we can analyze how the nature of external threats determines the
optimal political structure (centralization or decentralization) of the state. Specifically we canestablish the following results.
Implication 1 (One-Sided Threat). spacing
For any ⇤l > 0, Vc⇤ Vl⇤ + Vr⇤ and Vc⇤ > Vl⇤ .
Since the state requires revenues to sustain itself, it is prone to collapse when its finances
are weak. Implication 1 states that when the threat is one-sided, political centralization is more
resilient than political decentralization. The intuition is simple: a one-sided geopolitical threat
severe enough to bankrupt Authority l under political decentralization may not overwhelm acentralized authority c. This highlights the advantage of political centralization: it allows forresource pooling to deal with common threats to the territory because Authority c can mobilize
the taxable resources of the entire territory while Authority l can only mobilize half of it.
Implication 2 (Two-Sided Threats). spacing
A. For any ⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤r > ⇤, there exists threshold value (⇤l , ⇤r ) such that ifthen Vl⇤ + Vr⇤ < Vc⇤ .

< (⇤l , ⇤r )B. For any ⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤r > ⇤, there exists threshold value (⇤l , ⇤r ) such that ifthen Vc⇤ < Vl⇤ + Vr⇤ .

> (⇤l , ⇤r )While political centralization is always more resilient than political decentralization undera one-sided threat, under two-sided threats the relative resilience of centralization and decentralization depends on , the size of the territory. Implication 2A states that if the territory is
16Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Mc

0

Gc
Figure 10: When the territory ( )is large, a unified state has to makecolossal investment to deal with twosided threats.

.....Ml

Mr .....

0 Gl

Gr

Figure 11: When the territory ( )is large, a division of labor between
authorities l and r helps contain thecost of dealing with two-sided threats.

suﬃciently small, then political centralization is always preferred to decentralization—having acentralized state to protect both fronts (Figure 8) is more cost eﬀective than having two local
authorities dividing up the territory’s scare resources to make repetitive investments (Figure 9).
However, the reverse is true for a large territory. Implication 2B states that when the territoryis large and the threats are far apart, having two authorities, each taking on one threat, ispreferred to centralization because the cost of having a single authority simultaneously defending
both frontiers is exorbitantly high (Figures 10 and 11).
Hence, when facing severe two-sided threats, a small territory has a strong incentive tocentralize, while a large territory has a strong incentive to decentralize.
3.2 Extension: To Reform Or Not?
We now extend the model to introduce the decision to implement socioeconomic reform, which
is a set of policies necessary to modernize the economy such as conducting a thorough land
survey, clarifying parcel boundaries and formalizing land rights, suppressing bandits and secretsocieties, breaking up local distributional coalitions, and restraining the rent-seeking power of
special interest groups.
The timing of events is as follows: First authority i decides the location of its base Gi 2 [0, 1]
and state capacity investment Mi 0. Next, it decides whether to implement reform, whichchanges taxable income from y to y. Since this is a two-stage decision process, we employ
backward induction to solve it.
In practice, reform entails social dislocation and creates losers as well as winners, the losers
will attempt to block the changes that hurt their interest unless they are adequately compensated17

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Ml0
Mc

Mr0

Ml

Mr




0

Gc

0 Gl

Figure 12: A politically centralized
territory has state capacity (depicted
in red) higher than  everywhere. No
extra investment is required to manage
the reform process.

G0l

G0r

Gr

Figure 13: When the territory is large,
authorities l and r have to make extra
investments to extend their state capacities inland should they decide topursue economic reform.

(Olson, 1963; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000; Coşgel et al., 2012). In such situations, strong
political and social institutions could help overcome resistance from vested interests and fromlocal inertia through a mix of persuasion and coercion. To model this, we assume that an
authority is capable of pushing through reform only if its state capacity throughout the segment
it controls is no less than  > 0. We expect  to be relatively small compared with ⇤, since
suppressing a local rebellion should be a lesser challenge than fighting a colonial power.
Implication 3 (Reform). spacing
Under non-trivial two-sided threats (⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤r > ⇤):A. If the territory is politically centralized, reform will be implemented if yy > 0;

B. If the territory is politically decentralized and
if y y > 0;

 2( ⇤ ↵C. If the territory is politically decentralized and⇥if 12 (y y) + 4✓ (2⇤ 2↵ )2 ( + 2 + ⇤> 2( ⇤ ↵  )+ , reform will be implemented⇤↵)2 > 0.

)+ , reform will be implemented

Intuitively, in Case A because a politically centralized authority confronting non-trivial
two-sided threats has to invest heavily and build capacity that eﬀectively covers the entire spanof the territory, by default it is reform-ready, and will embrace reform as long as the returns
to reform (y y) are positive (Figure 12). Similarly, for a small and politically decentralized
territory (Case B), the state capacity of authorities l and r will generally span the entire (short)
territory. Hence, there is no additional cost to implement reform. However, for a large andpolitically decentralized territory (Case C), the authorities have to make additional investments
in state capacity before they are reform-ready (Figure 13). They will reject reform unless thereturns are suﬃciently large.
18

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Figure 14: Net Tax Revenues Under Diﬀerent Configurations(a) Japan(b) China: Left Authority(c) China: Right Authority

3.3 A Numerical Example
We provide a simple example to illustrate the two scenarios that are our primary concern.
Consider two separate territories, “China” and “Japan.” Let China = 18 and Japan = 2, torepresent the 18 provinces in China proper and the two major Japanese regions of Kanto andKansai. In addition, let m0 = 10, ✓ = 0.1, ↵ = 4, = 8, = 0.4,  = 0.1, y = 10, and supposethat reform will increase income to either y = 15 (small success) or y = 30 (large success).15
Initially, China faced a severe one-sided geopolitical threat from the left and ⇤l,China =20, ⇤r,China = 0, while Japan enjoyed a peaceful external environment and ⇤l,Japan = ⇤r,Japan = 0.
With the arrival of new geopolitical threats and the opportunity to reform, China now faces
an additional threat on its right flank and ⇤r,China > 0, while Japan finds itself confronting
two-sided threats and ⇤l,Japan = ⇤r,Japan > 0. We vary ⇤r,China , ⇤l,r,Japan , and y to explore how
they would aﬀect the optimal response in each territory.
Suppose that a negative net tax revenue implies state collapse. As Figure 14a illustrates, forJapan political decentralization is sustainable in the absence of external threats (i.e., Vl,Japan =Vr,Japan > 0 when ⇤l,Japan = ⇤r,Japan = 0). However, this is no longer true once new threats
emerge. The net tax revenues of the (two) decentralized authorities turn negative at relatively
low threat levels (from ⇤l,Japan = ⇤r,Japan = 1.6 onward). Centralization and reform oﬀer a betterchance of survival. Regardless of how severe the new threats and how small the returns to reformare, the payoﬀ of centralizing and reforming always exceeds that of remaining decentralized andunreformed.
15

These values are chosen for clear interpretation (so that the equilibrium net tax revenues in both territories
fluctuates around zero within the range of external threat levels considered). Varying the parameter values will
not qualitatively aﬀect the conclusions since the conclusions are based on Propositions 1–4.

19

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
As for China, Figure 14b illustrates that once an additional threat emerges on the right and⇤r,China > 1.6, net tax revenue becomes negative under political centralization. The centralized
authority c can avoid collapse if it allows a new authority r to be set up to administer the righthalf of the territory. Now, should decentralization take place, for the diminished authority cas well as the new authority r, the case for reform is not clear cut. Whether reform should be
implemented depends on their expectation of its returns. In Figures 14b and 14c, reform is
worthwhile when y = 30 (reform triples income), but not when y = 15 (reform increases income
by 50%). Hence, if the returns to reform are ex-ante uncertain, policymakers may disagree overthe need to reform if they have diﬀerent expectations of its returns.16
Finally, it is useful to discuss the case of a territory that is smaller than “Japan” ( < 2). If
the territory is very small, regardless of its political structure and with or without reform, its net
tax revenue will be negative even at modest threat levels. Hence, our model does not imply that
smaller is always better. Japan was smaller than China, but it was larger than Korea, Vietnam,
and Sulu, all of which lost their independence to colonial powers despite their long histories ofcontinuous statehood.

4

Application: Nineteenth century China and Japan

Building on the numerical example, we now demonstrate that our model oﬀers a useful framework
in organizing and understanding the historical developments discussed in Section 2.
Observation 1: Geopolitics. Our starting point is the changing geopolitical environment inEast Asia in the mid-nineteenth century. In our analysis, China corresponds to a large territory
initially confronting a severe one-sided threat from the steppe. In contrast, Tokugawa Japanprior to the arrival of the Black Ships was a small territory facing no significant external threats.
From the mid-nineteenth century, Russia replaced the steppe nomads as China’s main threatalong its north-west border while the previously peaceful coastal frontier now faced threats from
Western naval powers. Likewise, Japan now faced non-trivial threats arising from both frontiers.
Observation 2: Political Structure. Implication 1 suggests that when China was under
one-sided steppe threat, political centralization was optimal. Our model also helps explain the16

For historical accuracy, one may also assume that the new threats observed in “China” are more severe thanin “Japan” (i.e., ⇤l,China > ⇤l,Japan and ⇤r,China > ⇤r,Japan ) to reflect the perception that China bore the bruntof Western imperialism due to its closer proximity to Europe and because the size of its market made it a more
attractive target (Rowe, 2009). This would not aﬀect our conclusions.

20Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
pattern observed in Figure 1a: why, despite a higher concentration of population and wealth inSouth China, state capacity was located more heavily in the north.
In the 1850s, to suppress the Taiping Rebellion and restore order in the aﬀected provinces,
the Qing state devolved decision-making power to provincial administrators. The arrangement
was largely preserved in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion. To deal with the Western
naval powers more eﬀectively, the viceroys of Zhili and Liangjiang, who administered the key
coastal provinces, were granted the concurrent appointments of the minister of Beiyang (Northern
Seas) and the minister of Nanyang (Southern Seas) respectively. As Implication 2 predicts, theemergence of the maritime threat on top of the traditional threat from Inner Asia pushed China
toward political decentralization and the provincial oﬃcials responded by spearheading a complete
overhaul of China’s coastal defense, including the construction of the Beiyang and Nanyang
Fleets and new shipyards, arsenals, technical and translation schools, and other defense-related
endeavors.
As for Japan, before the intrusion of the West, its fragmented feudal structure was fiscallyineﬃcient but sustainable. However, the wastefulness of dividing a relatively small state into
numerous pint-sized domains was exposed once non-trivial external threats emerged. To shore
up defenses against the Western naval powers, the coastal domains took steps to bolster theirmilitary capabilities, including casting cannons, purchasing firearms, and improving training,which stretched their limited fiscal capacities. As Totman (1993, 535) observed, “[...] it appears
that the contemporary fiscal diﬃculties of such domains as Himeiji, Kawagoe, Mito, Tottori, andTsushima, and possibly Kii, Ogaki, and Owari can be partially attributed to the unusual defense
burdens they had recently assumed.”
Implication 2 predicts that for a small territory like Japan, the emergence of non-trivial
foreign threats would render political fragmentation untenable. Indeed, in the run-up to thecivil war, the antagonistic Shogunate and anti-Shogunate forces both sought to restructure theshogunate-domain system. The anti-Shogunate forces rallied under the slogan of sonno joi (revere
the emperor and expel the barbarians), which called for national unification under the emperor
and conspicuously omitted any mention of the shogun. The Shogunate, for its part, pursued
kobu gattai, or the union of the imperial court and the Shogunate (through marriage) so as tocreate a genuine central authority. Despite their rivalry, both camps saw national unification as aprecondition for Japan to resist further foreign aggression. Beasley (1973, 95) noted that it was
the Shogunate’s plans in 1866–67 to promote political centralization and reform that accelerated
the civil war as “Satsuma and Choshu began to fear that they must act quickly or lose theirchance.”21

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
Observation 3: Reform. Implication 3 predicts that a small state confronting non-trivial
external threats is likely to accept reform (1) to augment it limited resources, and (2) because
having already built suﬃcient state capacity, its marginal cost of reform is low. In the case ofJapan, the anti-Shogunate coalition was outwardly xenophobic before the Restoration, but oncethe civil war was over, they, too, sought to maintain good relations with the West and embraced
reform.
To be sure, there was tension among the Satsuma and Choshu factions; reforms were often
implemented without a clear, overarching plan and many achievements were the result of trialand-error (He, 2013). But within the ruling class, there was consensus on the untenability of thestatus quo and a shared fear that resource-poor Japan could be colonized by the West. Much of
the disagreement was centered on the speed and method of reform instead of its necessity.
The Meiji state modified and developed the system of political control and local administrationthat the former shogunate and domain administrations left behind (Nakabayashi, 2012). Asa strong state, its ability to deal with local grievances responsively enabled the successful
implementation of unpopular policies such as the land tax reform and public education. On
the one hand, it was willing to fine-tune its policies to appease dissent without fundamentallycompromising the reform agenda. For example, the land tax was lowered to 2.5% of the land
value in 1877 when it became clear that the initial level of 3% set during the 1873 land tax
reform was too heavy for many farmers.17 On the other hand, it did not hesitate to squelch any
sign of open dissent. The anti-tax, anti-reform uprisings of the 1870s—some of them involving as
many as 100,000 farmers—were forcefully suppressed, and the primary instigators were often
executed as a warning to others (Aoki, 1971; Duke, 2009).
What about China? Consistent with our model, the rise of the West in the mid-1800s
encouraged state building eﬀorts, especially along the coastal provinces. However, the vastness of
its territory implies that much of the country remained under-administered. While Japan would
see reform as the natural next step after its political centralization, reform in China was impededby a lack of state capacity at the local level, particularly in the rural interior (Kuhn, 2002).
As Albert Feuerwerker (1980, 59–60) noted, “the imperial bureaucracy, although highly
centralized in its formal organization, did not penetrate very deeply into Chinese society [...].”
One consequence was the high incidence of anti-missionary riots and assaults on foreigners living
in China which the state was often powerless to prevent and could only deal with by paying
compensation after the damage had been done (Wehrle, 1966). Unable to take a proactive stancedue to its low state capacity, the Qing state behaved reactively. In the eyes of Robert Hart
(1975, 118), Inspector-General of China’s Imperial Custom from 1863–1908, the imperial court’s
17

Similarly, the Meiji government aimed at establishing compulsory education of 8 years in 1872, but it was
reduced to 3 years in 1880 in response to peasant protests against the shortage of farm helpers.

22

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
policy “was not to guide but to follow events”, “what the people wish for [...] the Government
in the end sanctions.” Popular objections and concerns that telegraph lines, railways, andother new innovations would undermine social stability by inducing land grabs and disputes,
throwing porters and peddlers out of work, generating conflicts between locals and foreigners
contributed to the imperial court’s ambivalent attitude toward reform and hampered China’s
early industrialization (Fairbank, 1992; Baark, 1997).
Our model highlights that China in the second half of the nineteenth century needed
additional local state building and possibly further decentralization before it could manage
radical socioeconomic change (Figure 13). Due to the high costs and political risks that reform
entailed, these eﬀorts would only be worthwhile if the perceived benefits were huge. Consistent
with Implication 3, Chinese enthusiasm toward reform rose after they witnessed in the 1894–5
Sino-Japanese War Japan’s rapid transformation into a modern power.
Ironically, the Qing dynasty hastened its demise when it finally committed itself to undertake
institutional reform in the 1900s. The newly created provincial assemblies, one of the key
components in the reform package, helped end the dynasty by revolting against it in 1911–12.
A few years later, China entered the warlord era (1916–28). Although the era has received abad name due to the constant fighting among armies led by provincial strongmen, it was also
a time of intense local state building, when local governments under the warlords built new
institutions to tax, regulate markets, and provide public services (Remick, 2004). Mao, who led
the communists to national power in 1949, was in fact an advocate of provincial autonomy atthis time. In a newspaper article published in 1920, he argued for the breaking up of China into
smaller pieces (Mao, 1990),
We have to accept that there is utterly no hope of developing China collectively. The
best solution is to forgo the idea of collective development, embrace separatism, allow
each province to pursue its own development, and establish the principle of provincial
self-determination [...] it is best for China to fragment into 27 countries.
Consistent with our analysis, the Qing state collapsed when the diﬃculties of resisting foreign
aggression and reforming a large country while keeping all the pieces together proved too muchfor it to manage. The demise of Qing China in 1912 was followed by the fall of Tsarist Russia in
1917 and Ottoman Turkey in 1922. Both empires, like China, were large states that had struggled
to implement reforms when confronted with severe geopolitical threats. Their fate stood in stark
contrast with the rise of Japan and the dominance of medium-sized states in Europe.

23Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

5Discussion and Extensions

We stress that we do not purport to oﬀer a universal account of state centralization or fragmentation. Clearly, there are episodes of state centralization that have occurred in the absenceof geopolitical threats, in which case our model would not be applicable. Nevertheless, themechanisms that we highlight are not specific to China and Japan but apply more broadly toother parts of the world and contains generalizable insights for understanding the process ofstate-building.
For one, the unification of Anglo-Saxon England and the fragmentation of the Carolingian
empire in the ninth century provides an interesting historical parallel to the nineteenth-century
divergence between China and Japan. Viking raids from the north (a severe, one sided threat)
provided the impetus that enabled the West Saxon unification of England (a small, initiallypolitically fragmented territory). However, the same factor, in conjunction with Magyar invasions
from Eastern Europe and Muslim invasions from North Africa (i.e., multi-sided threats), contributed to the fragmentation of continental Western Europe (a large territory) as the Carolingianrulers lacked the administrative capacity to implement centralizing reforms in their large empire
and had to allow local aristocrats to take over regalian rights, raise armies, build fortifications,acquire mints and mines, and become residual claimants on local resources to defend the frontiers.
In Appendix A, we provide a detailed discussion of Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian
empire. We also discuss Muscovy Russia of the fifteenth century, which provided an example ofa large territory unifying in response to a one-directional geopolitical threat.
In the remaining of this section, we address a few possible criticisms of our framework.
First, the model assumes that authorities do not compete for territorial gains. We remove
this assumption in the general model in Appendix B. Without this assumption, authorities needto defend themselves not only against foreign threats, but against each other too. This would
strengthen the model’s implications—for example, it would generate a larger impetus for Japanto move from decentralization to centralization in the mid-nineteenth century, since politicaldecentralization now leads to more resource competition than previously assumed. It would also
help to explain why China’s political decentralization in the nineteenth century was partial andincomplete, and why the imperial court hesitated over reform and allowing provincial authorities
to drive China’s modernization.
Second, our conclusion that a large territory requires further state building before it can beready for radical socioeconomic change is not driven by the assumption of S  2. To see this,
suppose authorities l and r can devolve power to new authorities by voluntarily giving up land
(i.e., S > 2 is permissible). Now, for the entire territory to have suﬃcient state capacity so that24

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

Ml

Mr
Mlc0

0
Mrc

G0lc

G0rc


0 Gl

Gr

Figure 15: The desire to reform pushes a large territory toward further decentralization
with the setting up of two new authorities, lc and rc, to administer its inner segment.

reform can be pursued, l and r could (a) increase their respective investments (as in Figure 13),or (b) allow new authorities to be set up (as in Figure 15)—the new authorities will still have tobuild state capacity in the previously under-administered inner segment to a level above .
Third, in the model once an authority builds suﬃcient state capacity, the success of reform isguaranteed. This essentially assumes that authorities know how to reform. In reality, reform is arisky business and while one could learn from others, there is no guarantee that what works in
one country would work in another. In our case study, it is plausible that because Japan wascomparable in size to the Western European states, the cost for it to adopt Western institutions
and copy Western practices were lower and its chance of success higher. China was a completely
diﬀerent beast. No other country was remotely comparable in size—the United States had apopulation of 23 million in 1850, Jiangsu—one of the eighteenth provinces in China proper—
alone had 44 million people. It is not obvious that Western institutions and practices, based onorganizational principles tried and tested in small and medium-sized polities, could be successfullytransplanted into China without distorting their intended purposes. Indeed, sociologists haveargued that important similarities between Japanese and European feudalism had facilitatedJapan’s embrace of capitalism and Western political and social institutions (Anderson, 1974;
Umesao, 2003). Taking this factor into account would again strengthen our conclusion.
Fourth, it may seem like a shortcoming of our analysis that we take the size of a territory as
exogenous. In fact, this is not a bad approximation in the case of China and Japan. Japan is an
island archipelago, while China proper is traditionally bounded by major geographical barriers:
the Gobi desert in the north, the Himalayas in the West, the dense tropical rainforest in thesouth, and the Pacific Ocean in the east.18
Fifth, for analytical convenience we have abstracted from the composition of the politicalleadership. In the case of Japan, Aoki (2014) argues that the common samurai-administrator
18

While the Qing empire expanded into present-day Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet, these lands were economically unproductive. In 1820, China proper accounted for 98% of the Qing empire’s population (Sng andMoriguchi, 2014). Conceptually, the new lands can be considered as “barriers” that help define the territorial
limits of China proper instead of its natural and undiﬀerentiated extensions.

25Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
background of ruling class helped smooth the Tokugawa–Meiji transition. Meanwhile, mistrust
between the Manchu imperial court and the Han Chinese majority grew over the course of thenineteenth century as the traditional political order unraveled (Fairbank, 1992; Rowe, 2009). It
is not clear if racial division contributed meaningfully to the disagreement between the late-Qing
reformists and ultraconservatives, since the two camps were not split along racial lines. But if it
did, it would have deepened the dilemma that the Chinese state faced over decentralization andreform. Our model points to the greater salience of reform in Japan, which was in the common
interests of its ruling coalition. This is in keeping with the historical record. For example, while
there were initial conflicts within the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 1850s—as reflected by theAnsei Purge in which opponents of the opening up to western trade were removed from oﬃcial
positions—by the 1860s, a consensus emerged among the leaders in all camps about the need to
implement radical reforms (Jansen, 1961). The subsequent Satsuma Rebellion does not contradict
but instead validates our argument: the participants of the rebellion were dislocated samurai
whose interests were hurt in the reform process and the rebellion was decisively suppressed
because the state in Meiji Japan had suﬃcient capacity to do so.
Sixth, in the context of nineteenth-century China and Japan, one may assume in the modelthat the new threats observed in China are more severe than in Japan to reflect the perceptionthat China bore the brunt of Western imperialism due to its closer proximity to Europe andbecause the size of its market made it a more attractive target (Rowe, 2009). This would notaﬀect our analysis. As one could deduce from Figure 14 of the numerical example, we would reachthe same conclusions in Section 3.3 if we assume that ⇤l,China > ⇤l,Japan and ⇤r,China > ⇤r,Japan .
Finally, it is important to note that while our model can explain the choices and attitudes ofthe political leaders in China and Japan at this critical juncture, it does not predict the outcomesof the choices made. For example, the model predicts that the emergence of severe geopoliticalthreats in the nineteenth century would push Japan decisively toward political centralization,
but it has no explanatory power on whether the Shogunate or the anti-Shogunate coalition would
emerge victorious. Likewise, in our model political leaders are uncertain about the degree ofsuccess of reform when deciding whether to implement it. We do not assume that the leadersin Japan knew ex-ante that reform would reap huge rewards. Indeed, our model suggests that
uncertainty was one of the factors that contributed to the Chinese leaders’ initial ambivalence
toward reform.

26

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

6

Conclusion

Recent research suggests that the existence of a centralized state can play a crucial role in laying
the foundation for sustained economic growth (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012). In this paper westudy how geopolitical threats can lead to either state centralization or state fragmentation. We
build a model in which the existence of multi-sided geopolitical threats provides the incentives
for rulers of compact polities to centralize political institutions and invest in state capacity, but
can lead rulers of larger territories to devolve political power and underinvest in state capacity.
We apply this model to study an important historical episode: the creation of a unified statein Japan and the corresponding failure of China to modernize during the second half of thenineteenth century. Our analysis sheds new light on why China, which had been centralized
for much of its history, experienced disintegration upon the arrival of Western powers, and why
Japan, which had been politically fragmented for centuries, became unified and implemented
comprehensive reforms during the same period. In contrast to traditional accounts, our analysis
does not rely on exogenous diﬀerences in cultural attitudes toward reform or in the competenceof policymakers in China and Japan.
Our analysis provides new insights into the institutional preconditions for sustained economic
growth. The spread of innovation and economic growth that followed the Industrial Revolution
oﬀered many countries the possibility to import new technologies, attract capital and investment,
and to experience economic development, but only those countries with the appropriate politicalinstitutions were able to realize it. China and Japan oﬀer an important case study that sheds newlight on the political preconditions for building a state capable of achieving modern economic
growth.

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32Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

A

Appendix: External Validity

If our framework can provide a valid account of the divergence in state development in East Asia
after 1850, it should also cast light on other similar examples of state formation. Here we apply
our model to three other cases to provide some evidence for the generalizability and external
validity of our framework.
A.1 Anglo-Saxon EnglandAnglo-Saxon England provides an example of centralization in small territory facing a severe
one-sided external threat. In response to Viking invasions from the north, the kingdom of Wessex
was able to unify much of England and to build a precociously centralized state.
Early Anglo-Saxon England was politically fragmented. Between 650 and 800 AD its politicalconfiguration is traditionally referred to as the Heptarchy in reference to the seven main kingdoms
that comprised it, though in practice the number of competing kingdom varied over time. The
main kingdoms were Kent, Wessex, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, and Northumbria.
Within the Heptarchy, a particular kingdom might obtain temporary predominance as, forinstance, Northumbria did in the seventh century and Mercia did in the eighth century under
the overlordship of Oﬀa (r. 757–796). Nevertheless, no ruler came close to unifying England.19
Prior to 850, the threats facing these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were small. Warfare was endemic
but small scale. Wessex and Mercia faced sporadic border conflicts with the remnants of the
British kingdoms that inhabited Wales and Cornwall, while Northumberland faced raids andperiodic war with the kingdom of Strathclyde and from the Picts and Scots. But these threats
did not threaten the stability of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Like the Black Ships that confronted Tokugawa Japan a millennium later, the external threat
posed by the Vikings after 850 was both unexpected and qualitatively diﬀerent in magnitude.
They sought the long-term conquest of parts of the British isles and rapidly overran the kingdomsof Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia.20 The kings of Northumbria and East Anglia were
killed, perhaps as sacrifices to the pagan deity Woden (Wormald, 1982, 148). In the language ofour model, the Viking threat that emerged in 850s was a severe one-sided threat.
The kingdom of Wessex, however, survived because it was among the larger and more powerful19

During the Mercian period, historians detect a tendency toward political unification. For example, Oﬀafought numerous conflicts with Kent and claimed the kingship of Kent between 772–774 but for most of thisperiod the rulers of Kent were able to assert their independence (Yorke, 1990, 31).
20
The size and scale of the Viking raids has been the subject of controversy among historians. See discussion inWormald (1982, 132–152). While revisionist historians sought to scale back tradition accounts of the devastation
wrought by the Vikings, the modern consensus agrees that the Viking attacks of the second part of the ninth
century represented major invasions involving armies numbering in the thousands.

33

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

Figure 16: The Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. Between 850 and 1000, the kings of Wessex
created a unified kingdom of England. Note boundaries were in flux during the seventh andeighth centuries. Adapted from Nussli (2011).

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and because geographical location protected it from the first brunt of theViking invasion. Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) halted the invasion by the Viking “grand army” in
878 and used the breathing space this bought him to mobilize the resources of the unconquered
parts of his territory and to raise an army strong enough to roll back the Viking advance. In 886,
Alfred captured London. This marks the beginning of the West Saxon unification of Englandand “the gradual and halting emergence of a new kingdom that extended beyond the territorial
or tribal confines of the ancient kingdoms of Wessex, Kent, or Mercia” (Abels, 1998, 24–25).21
Alfred first unified the rival kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia and this union became thefoundation for this new English kingdom (Loyn, 1984, 8). Consistent with our model, onlya larger kingdom than Wessex was capable of providing the level of defense now needed todefeat the Viking threat. Alfred combined the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to increase the amount of
resources he could collect for the purpose of defense.
However, he did more than this. Historians attribute Alfred’s success to his ability to increasestate capacity: the reign of Alfred the Great saw the establishment of a “large standing army andnavy together with a public works programme of unparalleled magnitude” (Jones, 1993, 669).
Alfred established a system of fortifications known as burghs that provided a point of refuge
21

As one historian notes “[i]f one needs a date for the beginning of an English kingdom this is as good as any”
(John, 1982, 160).

34

Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
for the population from attack by Viking raiders. These fortifications were bureaucraticallyplanned and documented. Wormald notes: “the burghal system involved the deployment ofcolossal manpower resources . . . There is no more impressive evidence before Domesday Book of
the capacities of Anglo-Saxon government” (Wormald, 1982, 154). With some caveats we canview this as a program of “modernization” akin to that undertaken by peripheral societies in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The unification of Anglo-Saxon England is a classic case of state formation under the threatof invasion. Subsequent kings of Wessex would unify the entirety of England (though they would
call themselves rulers of the West Saxons, Mercians, or Angles as regional identities remained
important).22 In the face of a continued threat of new Viking invasions, the Anglo-Saxon kings’
policy of conquest and unification was accompanied by state building and investment in fiscal
and legal capacity. Tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings were legislators. They sought to limit
violence, for example by trying to prohibit feuding, and to impose common laws, and created“a crude but powerful bureaucracy” (John, 1982, 176). Historians argue that this precocious
unification helped put England on the path toward early centralization, a characteristic which
numerous scholars have pointed to in accounting for the subsequent success the English state
had in building fiscal capacity (e.g., Dincecco, 2010; Johnson and Koyama, 2014).23 Certainly, at
no point in its subsequent history was England ever divided into separate realms again.
A.2 The Fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire
Anglo-Saxon England centralized in response to the threat posed by the Vikings. Across thechannel, however, the empire of Charlemagne fragmented under the pressure of external threats
from Vikings in the north, Slavs and Magyars in the East, and Muslims from the south.
The Carolingian empire was established through the conquests of Charlemagne (r. 768–814)
who ruled over France, the Low Countries, much of Italy and Germany, and large parts of central
Europe. On Charlemagne’s death, the empire was passed on to his son Louis the Pious (r.
814–840) who spent his reign defending the frontiers from a variety of threats and facing downinternal revolts. As one historian notes, there was fighting on a number of fronts:
22
Eadred (r. 946–955), for instance, called himself “king, emperor of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians,
governor of the pagans, defender of the Britons” (John, 1982, 168).
23
As Campbell (2000) notes, “Late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state. It was an entity with an eﬀective
central authority, uniformly organised institutions, a national language, a national church, defined frontiers, and,above all, a strong sense of national identity” (10). “England was by then [1066] a nation-state. It is highly
improbable that any European rulers enjoyed closely organised authority over so wide an area as did its kings.
The dominions of the German King Henry IV were far more extensive, but the extent of his authority varied
from area to area; his government was by no means uniformly integrated; and he did not rule a state in the sensethat Edward the Confessor did. There is no question of there having been anything comparable to the English
state in France, Spain or Italy” (31–32).

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
in the south-west against the Muslims of Spain and the Basques; in the north-westagainst the Bretons; in the north-east against the Danes and their Slav allies; in thesouth-east against the Serbs and the Bulgars; and in Italy against the Byzantines andBeneventans. In addition there were invasion scares in the 800s on the north Frenchcoast, real invasions in southern Italy and Frisia, and skirmishes in the Mediterranean
Islands (Reuter, 1990, 391).
Viking raids began during the reign of Charlemagne but increased after his death. Louis the
Pious’s reign was also beset by civil wars, which reveal the pressure to decentralize militaryand political authority in response to local invasion threats (Morrissey, 1997). Charles Omanin surveying the decline of the Carolingian empire notes that ‘three or four compact national
kingdoms would be better able to cope with the Vikings than the vast but somewhat unwieldy
empire of Charles the Great’ (Oman, 1924, 95).

Figure 17: Viking, Magyar, and Muslim Invasions of Western Europe in the Ninth andTenth Centuries; The Carolingian Empire after the partition of AD 843.

Civil war led to the division of the empire in 843 into West Francia, East Francia, and Middle
Francia at the Treaty of Verdun (Figure 17). The empire was briefly reunited by Charles the Fat(r. 881–888) but his reign could not halt the process of internal decentralization as the power of
the king weakened in relation to local elites. Positions like the counts which were originally royal
appointments were converted into hereditary ones as these local power holders raised armies todefend against Viking or Muslim raiders, setting the stage for the ‘feudal revolution’ that took
place after 900 (Strayer, 1970; Chaney and Blaydes, 2013).
In summary, historians and political scientists agree that the fragmentation of central power
was at least partly in response to the external threats that the empire faced (Dhoudt, 1948; Spruyt,
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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
1994).24 Our model helps to explain why the response to the Viking threat in Anglo-Saxon
England was state consolidation and centralization whereas the Carolingian empire weakened
into response to Viking raids. First, Wessex was a small and compact polity and it was possible
for Alfred the Great and his successors to build the core of a coherent state within the territories
of Wessex before subduing the rest of Anglo-Saxon England. In contrast, the Carolingian empire
was extremely large and cumbersome. Carolingian rulers lacked the administrative capacity to
fully implement centralizing reforms. Second, the threats facing the Carolingian rulers camefrom multiple directions: it was impossible for the emperor to be present in, for example, both
Saxony and the Basque region in a single campaigning season. Political decentralization was
therefore the natural response to this multi-dimensional threat: local aristocrats took overregalian rights, raising armies, building fortifications, acquiring mints and mines, and becoming
residual claimants on local resources.
A.3 Muscovy Russia
We now consider the example of a large territory unifying in response to a one-directional
geopolitical threat: the rise of Muscovy and the foundation of the Russian empire.
Muscovy was not one of the principalities that formed the Kevian Rus’, the first state in
Russia. Under Yaroslav I (r. 1019–1054) and other early rulers, the Kievan Rus’ was a loose
federation of principalities that owed fealty to the ruler of Kiev. Figure 18a depicts the bordersof the various principalities that made up the Kievan Rus’ in the mid-1200s.
By the end of the twelfth century, the Kievan state was divided into roughly twelve diﬀerent
principalities. The most important of these included the Republic of Novgorod, the Grand Duchyof Vladimir, and the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia. The Kievan states comprised agriculturalists
in the south who practiced slash and burning agriculture and hunters, trappers, and woodsmenin the north. There was continuous low-level conflict with the nomads of the steppe, notably
the Pechenegs, Torki (Oguz), and Polovtsy (Qipchap, Cumans) who raided the settled lands
sporadically (Sunderland, 2004, 12). However, the conflict did not pose a threat to the existenceof the diﬀerent Kievan regimes.
This changed dramatically with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. As with
the Viking invasions of England, this was a non-trivial exogenous shock. The Russian states
were vulnerable because they were divided. As one historian notes “it was not so much military
unpreparedness and ineﬃciency that enfeebled the Russians as lack of unity between territories
in the north, the south and the south-west. There was no suzerain prince who had eﬀective
24

As Spruyt observes, ‘the breakup of central authority coincided with the increasing raids by Magyars,
Saracens, and Vikings’ (Spruyt, 1994, 37).

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

Figure 18: The Unification of the Russian World. Adapted from Perrie (2006).

control over all Russian lands” (Fennell, 1983, 86). Contemporary chroniclers portray theseinvasions in catastrophic terms listing city after city that was sacked. Modern historians areunable to estimate overall population losses but they agree that the devastation must have been
tremendous. Russia remained under Mongol domination for the subsequent two centuries. It
was only gradually that a new principality, Muscovy, was able to consolidate power in the lands
north of the old Kievan state.
In the late fifteenth century, Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) absorbed the other Russian principalities
and overthrew the power of the Golden Horde, thereby laying the foundations for the Russian
empire. Muscovy succeeded in repelling nomadic invasions from the East by investing massively
in frontier defenses. As in Anglo-Saxon England, the rulers of Muscovy invested in “palisades andearthworks between stands of forest to ‘cut-oﬀ’ nomadic raiding routes” (Sunderland, 2004, 24).
Khodarkovsky (2002, 221) notes that because of Muscovy’s long eastern border (Figure 18b),[its] frontiers remained “soft targets”, vulnerable to large-scale nomadic invasion
and impossible to defend against small-scale lightning raids. The lessons of theMongol conquest and its devastating impact upon the entire Eurasian continent
were clear: only a strong state with a centralized government capable and willing todevote significant resources to the defense of the steppe frontier could prevent similardisasters.
Yet by the late sixteenth century, the centralized empire that the rulers of Muscovy built
was facing threats from the west as well as the east. Consistent with our theory, these two-sided
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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
threats almost led to its breakup during the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). However, the new
Romanov dynasty was able to make peace in the west so as to focus on (and eventually subdue)
the threat from the steppe.
These examples could be expanded upon. In particular, history oﬀers many examples ofgeographically compact states such as Macedon, the Dutch Republic and Prussia building strong
states in response to foreign threats. However, it is important to emphasize that we do not claimthat the emergence of a strong external threat would always lead to centralization. If the threat
is too strong, it will overrun a decentralized territory without giving it the opportunity to unify.
Nevertheless, even in these cases, the systematic tendencies we identify in our model may still
be detected. For example, the Roman invasion of Gaul in the 50s BCE was so strong that it
overwhelmed resistance and led to the incorporation of Gaul into the Empire. However, the forceof the initial invasion did cause the fragmented tribes of Gaul to unify into a federation under
Vercingetorix in order to resist. In this case, the tendencies identified by our theory were present
but the result was a Roman victory instead of a unified Gaul.

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850

B

Appendix: General Model

In Section 3, we provide a stylized model to highlight the key mechanisms and results. Below, we
lay down a general model that (1) does not assume specific parametric forms, and (2) endogenizes
border formation, to show that the findings of the stylized model are robust to a relaxation of its
assumptions.
The general setup of the model is unchanged. As before, we model a territory as a line [0, ]with individuals uniformly distributed along this line. Each individual is endowed with incomey.
The territory faces threats from outside. An external threat of magnitude ⇤, if undeterred,causes gross damage is max { (⇤, t), 0} at a point t distance away from the frontier, where 1 > 0,
2 < 0, and ↵ > 0 is a scaling constant. Moreover, threats may emanate either from one frontier(at x = 0 only, without loss of generality) or from both frontiers. Whether they are one-sided or
two-sided, and the value of ⇤, depends on the continent’s geographical environment, which isexogenously determined.
The territory is divided into S 2 {1, 2} connected, mutually exclusive intervals, each administered by a regime (authority). When S = 1 (political centralization), one regime c, rules theentire continent. When S = 2 (political fragmentation), two regimes, l and r, coexist. Regime lis on the left of regime r. We focus on the symmetric equilibrium for tractability.
Regime i may invest in state capacity, and the cost of doing so is convex. For regimei 2 {c, l, r} to invest Mi 0, it costs k(Mi ), where k(0) = 0, k 0 > 0, and k 00 > 0. A regime’s state
capacity is strongest at its center of deployment, Gi ; for a location that is t distance away from
Gi , regime i’s state capacity on that location is m(Mi , t) = max{Mi µ(t), 0}, where µ(0) = 0,µ0 > 0, and µ00 > 0.
When S = 2, instead of assuming exogenous border formation, we now allow regimes l and r
to compete for land. Let regime l controls [0, b] and regime r controls [b, 1], where 0  b  1.
The border b is the location between Gl and Gr at which the two regimes are evenly matched instate capacity. Specifically, b is defined by:m(Ml , b

Gl ) = m(Mr , Gr

b)

(1)

State capacity not only helps to define the border, it also acts as a deterring force to block
the external threat from spreading inland. Consider a threat emanating from x = 0, a locationx 2 [0, ] is protected by regime i from the external threat originating from 0 if there exists
0  x̂  x such that (⇤, x̂) m(Mi , Gi x̂)  0. In a symmetric fashion, a location x 2 [0, ]is protected by regime i from the external threat originating from if there exists x  x̂ 
40Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
such that (⇤,x̂) m(Mi , x̂ Gi )  0.
If a contiguous segment of length more than (where 0 < < 1) is left unprotected, thena revolution occurs and the authority (or authorities if there is more than one) that taxes thesegment collapses. If the revolution constraint is not violated, the net revenue of regime e underempire is Vc = y k(Mc ) while the net revenues of regimes l and r under interstate competition
are Vl = b y k(Ml ) and Vr = (1 b) y k(Mr ), respectively.
The optimization problem facing a centralized state (Authority c) is straightforward: it first
decides Gc 2 [0, 1] and then Mc 0 to maximize its net revenue Vc = y k(Mc ). Since this isa two-stage decision process, we employ backward induction to solve the model.
Under political decentralization (S = 2), authorities l and r simultaneously choose Gl and Gr .
After observing the locations, they then simultaneously make investments Ml 0 and Mr 0.
Again, we employ backward induction to solve the model.
Let ⇤ be defined by (⇤, ) = 0. Below, we restate Propositions 1–4 of Section 3.
Proposition 1 (Centralization, One-Sided Threat). When the threat is one-sided and emanatesfrom x = 0:
A. If ⇤l  ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc 2 [ ⇤↵l , ] and makes zero investment
in state capacity;
B. If ⇤l > ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc =Mc = (⇤l , ).

and invests to the level

Proposition 2 (Centralization, Two-Sided Threats). Under threats from both x = 0 and x = :A. If ⇤l = ⇤r  ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc 2 [ ⇤↵l ,investment in state capacity;⇤r] and makes zero↵

B. If ⇤l = ⇤r > ⇤, the centralized state locates the base at Gc = 2 and it invests to the level
Mc = (⇤l , ) + µ( 2).
Proposition 3 (Decentralization, One-Sided Threat). Under an external threat emanating fromx = 0, there exists ⇤⇤ such that:
A. If ⇤l  ⇤, regime l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; regime r locates its base at Gr =b = 2 ; and Ml = Mr > 0.

Gl ;B. If ⇤l  ⇤⇤ , regime l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; regime r locates its base at Gr =b = 2 ; and Ml = Mr > 0.

Gl ;

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Geopolitics and Asia’s Little Divergence: State Building in China and Japan After 1850
C. If ⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤l > ⇤⇤ , regime l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , b]; regime r locates its base at
Gr <Gl ; b < 2 ; and Ml > 0, Mr > 0.
The intuition of this proposition is as follows. If the external threat is small enough so thatthe revolution constraint never binds (⇤l  ⇤), regimes l and r will focus on competing forland with each other (Case A). Importantly, because border formation is now endogenous andthe regimes have to invest in state capacity to compete with each other, even if there exists a
non-trivial external threat from the left frontier, the state capacity that the left regime built tocompete with the right regime is suﬃcient to block the threat and no additional investment onstate capacity is required as long as ⇤l  ⇤⇤ (Case B). It is only when the threat from the left
frontier is suﬃciently large (⇤l > ⇤ and ⇤l > ⇤⇤ ) that the left regime has to actively deal with
it. In this situation, it will have to shift its base leftward and this will cause it to cede land to
the right regime (Case C).
Proposition 4 (Decentralization, Two-Sided Threats). Under threats from both x = 0 and
x = , there exists ⇤⇤ such that:
A. If ⇤l = ⇤r  ⇤, Authority l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; Authority r locates its base at
Gr =Gl ; b = 2 ; and Ml = Mr = M ⇤ > 0.
B. If ⇤l = ⇤r  ⇤⇤ , Authority l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; Authority r locates its base at
Gr =Gl ; b = 2 ; and Ml = Mr = M ⇤ > 0.
C. If ⇤l = ⇤r > ⇤ and ⇤l = ⇤r > ⇤⇤ , Authority l locates its base at Gl 2 [ ⇤↵l , 12 ]; Authority rlocates its base at Gr =Gl ; b = 2 ; and Ml = Mr > M ⇤ > 0.
As in Proposition 3, Proposition 4 states that if the external threats are suﬃciently small,regimes l and r eﬀectively ignore them and focus on competing with each other (Cases A and B).
This is because the state capacity that each regime built to compete with each other is suﬃcient
to deal with the threats and no extra investment is required. But when the threats are large, theregimes will have to respond by increasing their respective investments in state capacity (CaseC).

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