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Unstately Power: Local Causes of China's Economic Reforms
Choice Outstanding Academic Book 1999 |
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Comments/Reviews
Description: Citation from the Joseph Levenson Book Prize 2000 "Lynn White... offers a profoundly important revision of the conventional view of the reforms that have dominated Chinese political, economic and cultural life since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Instead of focusing on the ways in which dictates from the political center inspired the changes, White offers compelling evidence that fundamental transformations at the local level arose out of circumstances created by the hollowing out of governmental institutions during the most destructive phase of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. White's exhaustive research also turns on it head the conventional wisdom about East Asian Developmental State theory by demonstrating that China's remarkable growth over the last twenty years came about not as the result of targeted central investment in strategic industries, as was the case throughout the region, but rather was a bottom-up process of local capital being fused with local entrepreneurialism and foreign investment.
"Spinning a riveting narrative pivoting on the changing economic position of Shanghai, White leads his readers step by step through the process by which the re-shaping of rural enterprise led to the progressive disintegration of the economic system that had marked the early years of the People's Republic. Eventually the growth of new networks among regions and industries rendered untenable the old combination of low factor prices and high cost finished products that had underwritten a substantial part of the income of the state. Among other things, this book should reshape the ongoing sinological debate about the relations in China between state and society, showing how the connection has many more facets than most scholars have recognized heretofore."
Review(s): "In the bumper crop of new books on China, White's book stands out because it focuses on the microunits of the Chinese economy. ... White's main thesis is that, contrary to popular belief, the economic reforms credited for China's spectacular economic growth were not initiated and implemented by the central leadership in Beijing, but by the semisovereign localities of southeastern China. Central authorities in Beijing embraced them as inevitable, unavoidable, and irrepressible. ... To his credit, White does not neglect the ugly side of the otherwise exciting, e.g., brutal exploitation of workers, forced labor of children, utterly miserable and unsanitary working conditions, long hours, and criminally violent atmosphere. ... Definitely an important contribution, amply documented and well presented. All levels." -- Choice
"This two-volume work brings Lynn White's ongoing study of Shanghai up to date, but it also does much more than that. The empirical focus has widened to the whole Shanghai delta region, and White's research is used to answer a wide range of questions on the nature, causes and direction of China's reforms. Ambitious in scope, the two books are intellectually stimulating, engagingly written, and will be of interest to a broad readership.. reforms." --
"A complex and ambitious set of books, Unstately Power will lend itself to a variety of uses. Its wide scope should make it an excellent source for short readings for undergraduate courses: on ideology,religion, intellectuals, nonintellectuals, industry,migration, birth control, music, newspapers, housing, how many people can fit on a Shanghai bus-it's all there, with plenty of empirical information, analysis and opinion that will stimulate discussion. This is an important book, which both gives an overview of the course of China's reforms and challenges a number of approaches to the study of these reforms." -- The China Journal
"An extremely ambitious undertaking, reflecting prodigious scholarship and wide-ranging interests...White has engaged just about every significant debate in contemporary China studies. Such a work is bound to be controversial, but by engaging such broad-ranging, impotant issues, White has done a real service to the field." -- American Political Science Review
    
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