INTRODUCTION 3 stories. The experience which illustrates this point best is that of South Korea, analysed in an article by Sudip Chaudhuri. Three factors seem to underlie that success: (i) the special relationship that South Korea had with US imperialism, as one among the many frontiers with communism, which gave her access to international capital and markets; (ii) the role of the State which used a number of non-market instruments to achieve well formulated goals; and (iii) a nationalist framework of policy-making which emphasised indigenous over foreign investors, allowing for substantial domestic capability-building. In Indonesia as well, Jayati Ghosh argues in her paper, the State played an overwhelming role in economic activity. In fact, that state (under Suharto) has been very much a part of an identifiable pattern of authoritarian regimes that have been associated with several of the more economically dynamic Asian countries. This paper seeks to address two questions relating to the Indonesian experience after 1966: (1) What was the nature of the Indonesian state, and how did it affect or determine the pattern of economic growth and industrialization? (2) To what extent can this pattern of development be judged a success, even in purely economic terms of growth and distribution ? Two crucial economic factors have been instrumental in preserving the power of this regime for such an extended period. First, its strategic position in the economy, resulting from its command over the dominant sources of wealth-oil, natural gas and minerals-as well as its tight control over most other economic activities. Second, from its very inception, this regime sought integration with international industrial and finance capital to form a broad economic and political alliance operating at the national level. This alliance, which includes the large bourgeoisie and landlord classes within the country, has been immeasurably strengthened by the continuous political and economic support it has received from international capital, and particularly the official backing from the USA and Japan. It is also not very clear how far this process of rapid industrialization and employment generation in certain sectors can go, or whether it will be sustained for enough time to actually cause structural transformation. Certainly, the advantages the Indonesian state earlier possessed for international capi-tal-of geo-political subordination and the assurance of a repressed labour force-are less attractive in a world in which many other states are keen to offer the same package. For that reason alone, and even leaving out the possibilities of internal socio-economic conflict, the coming decade may prove to be a more testing time for such authoritarian capitalist states in developing countries. Utsa Patnaik is concerned with a wholly different issue, viz. the less publicized consequences of the reform in China which is hailed as having generated one of the greatest economic success stories in recent times. Her focus is on the reform of the agricultural sector which involved the dismantling of collective production and the introduction of substantial elements of private property and private decision-making in production and investment. This