9
Ultimately, both the political and resource-based explanations for the Wenzhou model are
portable beyond Wenzhou itself. Many other rural mountainous localities were impoverished
and then experienced similar levels of spontaneous privatization of collective land and private
household production in the early years of reform. Wu points out that a number of localities in
Anhui shared similar resource endowments as Wenzhou,
20
and the same could be said of various
localities in Fujian and Guangdong before overseas Chinese/foreign investment became more
readily available to finance industrial development. In short, despite the designation of a certain
pattern of development as the “Wenzhou” model, it is not necessarily as unique as locals might
like to believe, which raises the broader issue of what elements are indigenous to a particular
locality versus what elements can be cultivated. In order to consider this issue in comparative
perspective, the next section discusses the Kerala model.
The Kerala Model
Kerala is a southwestern Indian state with a population of 31 million, a per capita GDP of
roughly US$470/year, and a popularly elected communist government. In contrast to the
Wenzhou model, which is considered successful by virtue of its performance on conventional
economic indicators such as growth in GDP, industrial output, and degree of private sector
development, the measures of developmental success in the Kerala model are based primarily on
human development indicators (HDI). Although the state of Kerala was not established until
1956, by the 1970s its relatively high level of social development had already attracted
international attention.
21
This was further documented by a string of observers, including the
anthropologist Richard Franke who observed that villagers in Nadur were extremely
20
Wu, “Local Property Rights Regimes,” 99.
21
United Nations, Poverty, Unemployment, and Development Policy: A Case Study of Selected Issues with Reference
to Kerala (New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1975).
Convention