Lynn T. White, III
Unstately Power: Volume I: Local Causes of China's Economic Reforms; Volume II: Local Causes of China's Intellectual, Legal and Governmental Reforms.
Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998/1999. East Gate Book. Two volumes. First printings. 0765600455/0765601494  xix/521/xxii/765 pages.
Softcover volumes, each measuring approximately 6" x 9.25", are like new.
Volume I
"China's dramatic reforms are usually said to have been caused by the policies of state leaders under Deng Xiaopeng. This new study shows, however, that reforms began and are maintained by local networks. They emerged first in the economy - the reforms began and are maintained by local networks. They emerged first in the economy - partly as unintended results of previous policies. Agricultural extension in Mao Zedong's time freed so much laboer from the land in rich areas, such as the Shanghai delta, that peasant leaders set up set up rural industries to employ clients. Many of these leaders were avowed "state cadres," but they acted for local constituencies more than for Beijing. Their initiatives, which can be documented in the early 1970s long before the 1978 proclamation of new enterprises and which the central bureaucracy could not monitor, took materials and markets aways from state industries. This caused socialist control of input prices and commodity flows to collapse by the mid-1980s. As a result, shortages and inflation bedeviled the economy, the state ran deficits, management decentralized, local banks proliferated, and immigration to cities soared."
Volume II
"As China's revolution winds down, the world's most populous country has seen profound changes in ideology, religion, media, and arts, and alterations on the social and political landscape, most evident in police and legal reforms. Volume II of "Unstately Power" shows how social diversification during the economic boom has modified political norms and public practices - contrary to the nostalgic hopes of many establishment conservatives. While political reforms have emerged partly from the local resources created by economic boom (as detailed in Volume I), these reforms have equally come from new norms among individuals and small groups. In comparing China's current situation to that of other countries and their revolutions, it is clear that China's reforms have followed a similar pattern; as the revolution's wave crests, the tide predictably changes and symbolic and police centralization ebb as local governance rises. The rapid modernization of China has necessitated development of new methods of maintaining coercive order at the local level, while the state political institutions grapple with new methods for selecting new leaders and adopting new laws. As China's regime type becomes more corporatist and less Leninist, the old traditional claims of intellectuals to state power have weakened. Indeed, intellectuals, ranging from clergy to students, have developed more regionalist and foreign interests. Ironically, the articulate "civil society" has often remained statist, straining against the many changes in established local networks."