Book Review: Rural–Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China by Lena Kaufmann

Abstract

approach to analysing Europe’s contemporary relations with China. Equally questionable are Reilly’s assumptions about China’s alleged failure in pursuing soft and military power, and about regulatory regimes as ‘obviously’ stronger in all Western Europe, weaker in all Eastern Europe, and the weakest in Myanmar. Again, Greece demonstrates that assumptions should never replace evidence-based analysis, however obvious they might seem. In sum, given the wealth of empirical detail, James Reilly’s Orchestration constitutes a useful addition to the scholarship about China’s economic statecraft and paradiplomacy. However, its implicit rationalist approach, reliance on the orchestration framework, questionable selection of case studies, and equally problematic key assumptions not only prevent Orchestration from accounting for the complexity of China’s economic diplomacy and its efficacy in the 2008–16 period, but also render it of limited utility to those seeking to understand the Xi Jinping regime’s increasingly assertive economic statecraft in the era of wolf-warrior diplomacy.