Sun village is in the hills on the coast above the Putian plain in central Fujian province. Its land is relatively barren, producing rice and sweet potatoes insufficient for most households to subsist and pay taxes and fees. They make up the rest of their income from sidelines, including the peddling of salt, travelling as masons or carpenters, or general labour, but lately as jewellers and then as agents of a flourishing and nationwide industry of selling plastic moulds for jewellery, which are produced in the village. It had had a reputation for being backward and remote, in the wild beyond the coastal defence against the Ming patriot and smuggler Zheng Chengong in the Qing and more recently subject to raids from the Taiwanese Islands of the Jinmen archipelago just a few kilometres out to sea. Now it is famous for its travelling jewellers and the wealth they have brought.

The author is a native of this village, now an anthropologist in Zhongshan University, Guangzhou. The path he, the pedlars and the jewellers took out of Sun village was not a cutting off. It also brought them back. The story of that path and the opening of other paths in and out of the village, eventually their being paved, serve him as material and metaphor for a history of extension of village life, not a hollowing out.

The book proper is a quite detailed history of 200 pages, but it is followed by an 89-page micro history covering similar topics in the voice of the author's father, quoting interviews they recorded over four years, between 2005 and 2009.

The interlude of collectivization and the resumption of marketing, migration and the greater fanning out of villagers have changed and continue to change village institutions. The rebuilding of the village temple is now within a more limited local ritual sphere, less interlinked with the ritual spheres of neighbouring village temples. Spirit mediums flourish, but are now older women rather than men as in earlier times; they deal with the village's own ghosts as well as threats from other villages' ghosts. The gods housed in the temple are taken out annually for an exorcism of ghosts as well as for the first-month tour and feast, staggered with the dates of the processions of neighbouring villagers so they can attend each other's feasts. So, there has been the characteristic Fujian ritual revival, but now with fewer pilgrimages. The extension of migration has broken through the spheres of reciprocal marriage and its accompanying exchanges, with the consequence of inflating bride prices and wedding gifts, as everywhere else in China.

Wu writes that other studies of ritual practices in contemporary China, including mine, are wrong to claim that there is still a hierarchy and a pantheon of gods. He claims for Sun village there is now nothing between the local and the celestial, but then he contradicts himself when he writes of gods in ranks and gods being assisted by lower spirits. Exaggerating change in order to wrong foot other studies seems an unnecessary step to make way for this study, which is in any case of great interest.

A central topic is the creation, maintenance and governance of public goods, the temple, the ponds of rainfall irrigation water, bridges and of course paths. Curiously his main reference here is Prasenjit Duara on the cultural nexus of power in the late imperial and early Republican periods in Northern China. He entirely omits to discuss the work of Zheng Zhenman on the organization of the reclamation of land and the governance of irrigation in the Putian plain, next door to the coastal strip of Sun village. Difficult to understand this, since he does refer to Zheng's work in the list of references. A comparison of the richer and larger public goods organized through temples and lineages in the plain with the poorer but nevertheless vital role of village temples in the creation and maintenance of public goods in Sun and its neighbouring villages in their coastal hills would have made a good complement. There is too little material here on the neighbouring villages, but hints about the reliance of Sun village disputants on arbitration backed by physical force organized in neighbouring villages could have been expanded. This and more could have been added to Kenneth Dean's comments, based on his and Zheng's joint work on the Putian plain, on the inappropriateness of the concept of civil society to analyse these formations of public goods and their governance. Dean prefers to think of the interface between state-sponsored institutions and locally supported and regenerated institutions as interruption and appropriation. And that is very close to what Wu Chongqing describes and analyses in the recent history of Sun village, except that it was laced with the organization of physical force locally, by village-based bandits.

Wu prefers to use the term “state involution” taken from Duara to show how Sun village in the years of collectivization saw an intensification of state-sponsored local institutions, in particular the village committee and the Party secretary. He describes their overriding preoccupation with the collection of grain quotas and taxes and fees, which included “sideline fees” for turning blind eyes to peddling, and resorting to redistribution of land to households in order to stimulate the filling of quotas, long before it became official policy to do so. The local state-sponsored institutions relied on revived unofficial institutions, lineages, their genealogies and the local temple and its gods and festivals, in particular the village elders and ritual leaders who had the trust of villagers for their god-endorsed moral rectitude. Village elders of the three lineages were well respected older men, one of whom was the author's father. Ritual leaders were chosen by divination blocks seeking approval from the village gods.

At various points the justified mistrust of village cadres – dating from the Great Leap Forward days onward, when they ate the grain they requisitioned from starving villagers – made it impossible for cadres to meet the quotas demanded of them by their township superiors, and they had to find compromise arrangements with villagers as well as with their superiors. To make these compromises, the cadres needed the village elders and ritual leaders. Beyond that, the money collected by the ritual leaders from every household provided not only for the repairs of the temple and the main expenses of the annual festivals but also a surplus from which roads were paved and bridges repaired. Village elders volunteered to be mediators in village disputes, now without sanctions of force but relying instead on the gods' charisma and celestial principles, as the state-sponsored team in Sun village campaigned to form “civilised hamlets.” The other side of the compromise was the support the cadres gave to the reconstruction of the temple.

This state involution is an updated example of what Vivienne Shue described in the 1980s as the cellular extension of the state, reinforcing the powers of unofficial local authority. It is an intriguing study of the history of sub-state institutions, from the imperial and Republican baojia system of mutual surveillance and tax collection into the present day, and their combination of official opposition to and fostering of the bottom-up institutions of kinship, marriage, network extension, temple gods, ancestors and ghosts. There is no understanding of the state in China, past or present, without such studies.