An Inquiry into Engineer-Led Industrialization: The Motorcycle Industries in Japan and Chongqing

In the previous chapter we examined the hypothesis that the development of market transactions facilitated the entry of new enterprises, thereby expanding the quantity of production, which, in turn, induced the quality improvement by reducing the profitability of producing low-quality products. Since marketing is the key to success in the garment industry, former merchants played the role of entrepreneurs in the transition from the quantity expansion to the quality improvement phases. In the motorcycle industry, as well as the machinery industry to be analyzed in the next chapter, it is often engineers who initiate a new business and undertake innovations, as production is technically more complicated than garment production. In this chapter, we would like to explore first, whether clusters are indeed important for the development of the motorcycle industry and second, whether the evolutionary processes of industrial development, consisting of the initiation, quantity expansion, and quality improvement, take place in this engineer-led industry.