This volume adopts a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to development that brings together issues that are characteristic of the lifelong scholarship of Professor Gordon White. These include a focus on the state, civil society, welfare and globalization. The range of disciplines represented including political science, economics, sociology and social and economic anthropology and a regional focus on China, India and East Asia gives rise to an unusually creative and synergistic set of ideas for thinking about the various meanings of politics in development.

This volume adopts a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to development that brings together issues that are characteristic of the lifelong scholarship of Professor Gordon White. These include a focus on the state, civil society, welfare and globalization.

This is a study of the organization and operations of Chinese government at the county level. Highlighting the contention-prone yet often collaborative relationships between county officials, and the production units and administration above and below them, the authors open a window on the Chinese state and statecraft in the vast bureaucratic middle ground between Beijing policymaking and community-level politics. Using data drawn from Shulu County, Hebei, over the last decade of the Mao era and the first decade of the Deng period, supplemented by fieldwork carried out between 1979 and 1990,...