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This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program

China's countryside has been the target of dramatic change since 1949. The CCP directed redistribution in land reform, the transformation away from private farming to collectivization, and, most recently, the move back to household production. Throughout the PRC's 50 years, agriculture and peasants have paid for the regime's ambitious programme of industrialization, as the price scissors consistently favoured the urban over the rural producers. The state struggled with its food producers over the grain harvest, using ideology and organization to maximize both the production and extraction of the surplus from the countryside.

All states have a role in development, but this varies widely. The spectrum is defined at one end by thelaissez faireminimalist state whose role is limited to ensuring a stable and secure environment so that contracts, property rights and other institutions of the market can be honoured. At the opposite end are the centrally planned Leninist states that directly replace the market with bureaucratic allocation and planning. Between these two extremes are the capitalist developmental states of Japan and the East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) that are neither Communist norlaissez faire, but exhibit characteristics of both. The state plays an activist, rather than a minimalist, role; there is planning, but it is geared toward creating maximum competitive and comparative advantage for manufacturers within a market economy.

As the author sees it, all states have a role in development, but this varies widely. China is a distinctive form of state-led growth that she calls local state corporatism. The author explores the constituent elements of China's local state corporatism and shows that while the post-Mao state retains key features of the Maoist system, the decision to accomodate mandates of rapid economic development in a market context has resulted in qualitatively new variety of developmental state. (DÜI-Sen)

In the 1980s fiscal reform in China provided localities with strong incentives and a heightened capacity to pursue industrial growth. As a result, local governments have responded vigorously to economic reform, managing rural collective-owned enterprises as diversified corporations, with local officials performing the role of a board of directors. This article analyzes the incentives that have led to the development of this form of local state corporatism and rapid rural industrialization, and it describes the ways in which local governments coordinate economic activity and reallocate revenues from industrial production. These developments are important for two reasons: they show that local government involvement in the economy does not necessarily decline with the expansion of market coordination; and they offer a successful model of reform that serves as a counterpoint to privatization proposals.