Vivienne Shue

Patricia M. Thornton

Evolving Practices of Power

To Govern China

Atul Kohli

Joel Samuel Migdal

Including cases drawn from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, this collection of scholarly essays is relevant to the growing state theory literature in the social sciences, stressing a state-in-society approach to the study of political development.

Domination and Transformation in the Third World

State Power and Social Forces

Christine Wong

China’s stunning record of economic development since the 1970s has been marred by an increasingly obvious gap between the country’s ‘haves’ and its ‘have-nots’. While people living in some parts of the country have enjoyed dramatically improved conditions of life, those in other districts and regions have slipped ever further behind in terms of access to health, wealth, education, security and opportunity. Paying for Progress in China is a collection of essays which trace the causes of this growing inequality, using new data including surveys, interviews, newly available official statistics and in-depth fieldwork. Their findings expose the malfunctioning of China’s ‘broken’ intergovernmental fiscal system, which has exacerbated the disequalizing effects of emerging market forces. Whilst the government’s deliberately ‘pro-poor’ development policies have in recent years sought to reduce the gap between rich and poor, both markets, and also state institutions and policies, are continuing to create perverse equity outcomes across the country, confounding hopes for better-balanced and more inclusive growth in China. The interdisciplinary approach of this collection, incorporating work by economists, sociologists and political scientists, makes it a valuable resource for students of contemporary Chinese political economy and social development.

Public Finance, Human Welfare and Changing Patterns of Inequality

Paying for Progress in China

These four conceptual and critical essays on state and society in contemporary China argue vigorously against the grain of prevailing scholarly interpretation. In substantive content, they explore two major themes from different historical and theoretical points of departure. First, the author argues that the party/state under Mao fell far short of the full control over China's peasant society that outside observers often assumed it had achieved. She shows, instead, how the Maoist state frequently pursued policies that in fact had the ironic effect of strengthening the resistance of rural communities against the central political apparatus. Second, she contends that once the true limitations on the Maoist state's power in rural areas are rightly understood, it becomes clear that one effect of the post-Mao economic and political reforms may be to enhance rather than to diminish the state's authority in the countryside — despite all the reformists' rhetoric to the contrary. These essays on "how to think about the Chinese state" are designed to stimulate debate about assumptions and methods in the field of Chinese political analysis. The controversies they raise, however, make them highly relevant to scholars outside Chinese studies who are interested in theories of the state, in the interrelations of state and society, and in the fate of the peasantry under socialism.

Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic

The Reach of the State

Vivienne Shue

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