China’s history IOTL in the Nanjing Decade provides a glimpse into what direction economic development would have taken under a weak, or in this case ideologically-limited, government; there was a reason that despite significant economic growth and the formation of a large mercantile and industrial elite in the Yangtze River Valley, the CCP was still able to mobilize millions of people from the poor peasantry to defeat the KMT.
Also, while import substitution doesn’t work worth a damn as a path to development, many of that nations which have followed the prescriptions of classical economics and the IMF have remained inpoverished, their low labor costs outweighed by the vastly superior concentration of capital that industrial nations can bring to production.
I would posit that China’s government-sponsored centralization of capital in a few coastal regions was precisely what enabled them to compete and become the world’s workshop, and that everything which followed that decision through about 2010 has been based on the principle of using the funds, trade surpluses, and tax revenues from those expanding regions to fund the development of the rest of the country. Only since then has the domestic consumer market and the purchasing power of the country been sufficiently strong to make itself felt as the driving force behind economic growth.