Tamed Village “Democracy”

Wang's book offers an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced analysis of how local state agents maintain control over village self-governance in China. His careful analysis of primary documents enables him to explicate the formal mechanisms used by members of the local state to influence village affairs. Meanwhile, his rigorous and fascinating ethnographic data enable him to elucidate the manifold ways in which informal clientelist ties between local state officials and village elites permit