The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic

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Stanford University Press, 1990年2月1日 - 192 頁
These four conceptual and critical essays on state and society in contemporary China argue vigorously against the grain of prevailing scholarly interpretation. In substantive content, they explore two major themes from different historical and theoretical points of departure.

First, the author argues that the party/state under Mao fell far short of the full control over China's peasant society that outside observers often assumed it had achieved. She shows, instead, how the Maoist state frequently pursued policies that in fact had the ironic effect of strengthening the resistance of rural communities against the central political apparatus. Second, she contends that once the true limitations on the Maoist state's power in rural areas are rightly understood, it becomes clear that one effect of the post-Mao economic and political reforms may be to enhance rather than to diminish the state's authority in the countryside despite all the reformists' rhetoric to the contrary.

These essays on "how to think about the Chinese state" are designed to stimulate debate about assumptions and methods in the field of Chinese political analysis. The controversies they raise, however, make them highly relevant to scholars outside Chinese studies who are interested in theories of the state, in the interrelations of state and society, and in the fate of the peasantry under socialism.

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Introduction I
1
Peasant Localism and the Chinese State
31
The Reach of the State
73
Four
123
Notes
155

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第 36 頁 - ... bourgeois law," and thereby undermine the standing ground of its defenders, the bureaucracy. In reality the opposite thing has happened: the growth of the productive forces has been so far accompanied by an extreme development of all forms of inequality, privilege and advantage, and therewith of bureaucratism. That too is not accidental. In its first period, the Soviet regime was undoubtedly far more equalitarian and less bureaucratic than now.
第 157 頁 - Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), and Morton H.
第 28 頁 - Malinowski— namely, a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view.
第 36 頁 - The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.
第 91 頁 - State was never an arbiter between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, still less an instrument of the nascent bourgeoisie against the aristocracy: it was the new political carapace of a threatened nobility.
第 158 頁 - The Cultural Revolution: 1967 in Review (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1968...
第 92 頁 - Weber did forty years ago, on the negative factors accounting for the arrested development of towns and of an urban class in the East and particularly in China. These are, in the first place, the absence of charters, of legalized status, of a system of jurisprudence, and, above all, of a code of civil law. Next, there was the lack of civic liberty, of secure privileges, and of autonomy in the administration of towns, so that the towns— unlike those of the West —did not become a magnet for the...
第 159 頁 - Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,
第 92 頁 - West —did not become a magnet for the countryside. The town was therefore unable to fill the role of social catalyst. Unlike our towns, it could not become the center of attraction because its life remained dominated, as indeed the entire social organism was dominated, by the omnipresent and omnipotent state— that is, the uncontested, absolute, and despotic power of a class of scholar-officials who could not tolerate any form of private enterprise, or who seized any private undertaking that had...
第 114 頁 - By creating a new Communist party and by training a new type of leader, the cadre, the Chinese Communists were finally able to achieve what no state power in Chinese history had been able to do: to create an organization loyal to the state which was also solidly imbedded in the natural...

關於作者 (1990)

Vivienne Shue is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Peasant China in Transition; The Dynamics of Development Toward Socialism, 1949-1956.

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