The rise and fall of imperial China: the social origins of state development

Abstract

author charges, it created through Mao’s disastrous rural policies. It permitted the return of household-based production (the responsibility system) only because it realised that the rural sector needed far more investment than the government could afford (61–63). Probably the party’s most positive poverty alleviation policy was to make economic development the major criterion for cadre promotion. A serious problem with the cadre system, and one that, in a path-dependency manner, reaches well into the past, is corruption. Because of their authority to grant permits, cadres are in a good position to demand, or be offered, bribes. Despite decades of grassroots complaints the party took no action until around 2010 when Beijing discovered CIA penetration of military, intelligence, government, and party affairs, which had been facilitated by paying the bribes cadres needed for promotion. More than two million cadres were punished in Xi’s anticorruption campaign. This foreign infiltration in combination with the GFC fomented a shift away from the reform era to the more Leninist China that we see today. This excellent book provides valuable insights into our understanding of the PRC. Its analysis of Chinese society is pathbreaking in the manner of Richard McGregor’s (2010) The Party.