State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance. By Julia C. Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 280 pp. ISBN: 9781108701655 (paper)

• Published in: The Journal of Asian Studies 2021, Vol.80 (3), p.730-732
• Main Author: Newland, Sara A.
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Asian studies; Book Reviews—China and Inner Asia; Bureaucracy; Campaigns; Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975); Land reform; Local elections; Modernization; Propaganda; Public opinion; Rural development; Social cohesion; State elections; Wealth
• ISSN: 0021-9118; 1752-0401
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021911821000899

In this regard, State Formation in China and Taiwan fits nicely with other recent work on rural development that similarly emphasizes the overlap between bureaucratic institutions and development campaigns.1 The book also highlights a second important similarity between the two Party-states: public performance played an important role in allowing these newly formed states to display their values to the population and build public support for their policies (whether through enthusiastic participation or fear). The specifics of the regime's “performances” were quite different, however—the CCP embraced campaign-style modes of performance, “put[ting] on a show of mass revolutionary enthusiasm” (p. 144), whereas the KMT used propaganda and bureaucratic procedures to “break apart extant bonds of social solidarity and atomize individuals” through trials and executions conducted in secret (p. 150). Nonetheless, Strauss's book provides readers with a wealth of new information and represents a major advance in our knowledge of state formation in the wake of the Chinese Civil War. 1 Kristen Looney, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020). [e-mail]