Start as a simple and more neutral nation, like Spain, Portugal, Japan, Sweden, etc. Some place that lets you really sit there and focus on nation building thats strong enough to ward off the great powers and won't generally need to participate in wars unless you feel like fucking around. Learn how to build up an industrial base alongside balancing construction capacity, i.e building lumber camps, tool factories, construction camps, iron mines, balancing a transition from wood tools to iron tools, etc. without going over the national income by too much. Basically use your national treasury as a sort of storage depot to be deplete at a slow steady rate when building shit as a nation but when it's not being used or you shut off construction the bank number goes up again and the capitalist class slowly builds shit too with their own funds. Balance between building stuff as a nation and letting the capitalists build shit.

if you can work a diplomatic deal with the great powers to build shit in your own borders, get it. try to include granting monopolies to companies that build valuable commodities. (pro tip, before you negotiate a deal for granting a monopoly for a commodity, i.e clothes, nationalize - if you're able - the entire industry to be monopolized so you can let the great powers buy up your now-nationally owned factories to maximize production of valuable commodities) This will supplement your own construction industry. it also helps setting exports for over-produced goods to be non-tariffed and imports for in-demand goods to mild tariffed to try and gain a greater market share of the overproduced commodity in the world market while discouraging other nations from gaining world market dominance while you build up production centers to fill in your local demand.

research. race for rail. Rail will let your industry bloom beyond its natural limitations of the province. try to focus on building industrial hubs on large population centers and locally produced goods. example: In China, shanxi has iron, coal, sulpher if i remember, and enough wood, and a few million people. building here a few tool factories, lumber camps, and iron mines lets you build a basic base to jump from wood tools, to iron tools, to steel tools as soon as the tech comes in, to building engines when rail comes in, to becoming an industrial powerhouse due to the location having just a great amount of primary resources to exploit to build up heavy industries and support the growth of light industries. a good China play involves luck getting the british to fuck off, racing for industrialization, then utilizing Shanxi and other provinces to build an industrial base, then conqueroring the world through economic overproduction