Leon Trotsky's Theory Explains China's Economic Leapfrog

As I see it

Sometimes, it pays to be a backward country

For all the destruction of the Mao era, it also replaced traditional structures with modern frameworks that set up China for rapid growth

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Alex Lo has been an SCMP columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China.

Published: 9:30am, 8 Jul 2026

Who would have thought that Leon Trotsky inadvertently offered a theory to explain China’s economic leapfrog into the 21st century after bouncing back from history’s worst famine and the Cultural Revolution?

In recent decades, some people thought China was done for and would eventually collapse. They might have done better if they had read at least the first chapter of Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution. Here, he expounds on what he calls “the privilege of historic backwardness”, which seems to apply quite well to China’s economic and technological leapfrogging.

“A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries,” he wrote. “But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past.” Does that sound a lot like China in the past few decades?

Trotsky continues: “Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages … Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character.

“The possibility of skipping over intermediate steps is of course by no means absolute. Its degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities of the country.”

Witness fast-growing economies in Africa that have leapfrogged to 5G networks and e-commerce without the intermediate development stages.