The past decade has been a productive and innovative one for the scholarship on state-building. In contrast to the now classic, so-called bellicist approach to state-building developed in the Western European context, recent contributions have emerged from experiences outside of Europe. Enze Han’s Asymmetrical Neighbors and Julia Strauss’s State Formation in China and Taiwan are representative of this new and welcome trend not just in their empirical focus on East and Southeast Asia but also in their exploration of causal factors that have received insufficient attention in the Eurocentric literature. Going beyond commonly examined domestic causes of state strength and weakness, Han analyzes how interstate conflict and cross-border ethnic relations in the borderlands of China, Myanmar, and Thailand affected these states’ ability to exercise control at the subnational level. Strauss, in her comparative study of China’s Sunan region and Taiwan in the post-1949 period, redirects our attention away from the question of why strong states developed in some places but not others to that of how. In particular, she examines how state-builders in both territories employed political performances to authenticate and legitimate the new political order in the face of skeptical and even hostile populations.

Han begins his investigation with a critique of the state-building literature: with the state as a whole often constituting the unit of analysis, much of our theoretical understanding of state-building has focused on causal processes and outcomes at the national level. This is especially so in the bellicist approach, where the need to mobilize resources for warfare is identified as the key impetus for innovations in national-level administrative and political institutions that led to the development of the modern (Weberian) state. This perspective may have indeed been appropriate for analyzing state formation in Europe, given the type of wars historically fought in the region, the smallness of European states, and the continent’s geography and climate. However, joining others writing on state-building in non-European contexts, Han demonstrates that this Eurocentric perspective fails to take into account how interstate conflict has had highly uneven effects within a state’s territorial bounds elsewhere in the world.

Han focuses on how interstate conflict affects borderlands differently from the rest of the country in two ways. First, he analyzes the dynamics of foreign subversion, where a state attempts to weaken its rival by supporting rebel organizations in the neighboring country’s borderlands. Second, Han examines the ways in which the presence of co-ethnics across international boundaries affects the ability of a government to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the national community. On one hand, ethnic minorities may seek assistance from an external kin state, where co-ethnics constitute its governing elite. On the other, ethnic minorities compare their well-being to that of co-ethnics across borders and, as a result, may become dissatisfied and exhibit hostility toward their own government.

By examining these dynamics in the borderlands of China, Myanmar, and Thailand, Han provides an empirically rich analysis of historical events that have been largely ignored by scholars of state-building. In the interior chapters, readers will find fascinating accounts of how a faction of the Guomindang (typically abbreviated as KMT, after its Wade-Giles romanization of Kuomintang) retreated to Myanmar’s Shan state rather than to Taiwan, along with the rest of the KMT leadership, and how KMT activity in this region both impeded Myanmar’s state-building efforts and transformed the Shan state into the world’s foremost hub for the production of narcotics. Also examined is the way in which Chinese assistance to the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) not only prolonged the communist insurgency but also, because CPB heavily recruited fighters from the Wa ethnic group, exacerbated ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s northeast region. Turning to cross-border ethnic relations and their effects on nation-building, Han shows, among other dynamics, that resistance by Myanmar’s Kachin people toward their government was partly driven by comparison of their situation to that of the Jingpo in China’s Yunnan province.

The book is less successful at developing and substantiating a theory of state-building in the borderlands, however. Han advances two sets of predictions concerning a government’s ability to establish territorial control and integrate ethnic minorities in the outer reaches of the state; a common causal variable in these predictions is the national-level balance of power between countries. In the first half of the book, Han argues that foreign subversion is observed in asymmetrical country dyads, which leads the powerful state to support rebel groups in the weaker one. Indeed, in the case of China’s support of the CPB in Myanmar, the outcome follows this theoretical prediction. But it is unclear whether power asymmetry actually contributed to China’s decision to support the CPB in this particular case or whether foreign subversion is generally observed in the weaker country of an asymmetrical dyad. If anything, foreign subversion is a strategy that may appeal to weak states seeking to destabilize a more powerful foe, because the principal utility of foreign subversion (according to Melissa Lee, Crippling Leviathan, 2020) is that it can be pursued cheaply and covertly. Han’s theoretical discussion of power asymmetry’s impact on ethnic politics is also underdeveloped. A more powerful kin state certainly has greater capacity to intervene on behalf of co-ethnics across borders, but little explanation is given as to why power asymmetry increases the likelihood of minority groups unfavorably comparing their lot with cross-border co-ethnics to obstruct the state’s nation-building campaign.

Yet, that Han’s analysis’s causal argument may be challenged for reasons of internal and external validity is hardly unique and reflects broader problems with theory construction in the state-building literature. Given the premium placed on predictive theories in the discipline of political science, recent works on state-building have largely sought to explain why strong states appear in some places but not others. To this end, factors such as the prevalence and intensity of interstate war, the strength of rebel groups, and geography and climate have been advanced as explanatory variables. Similarly, Han offers interstate power asymmetry, by way of foreign subversion and cross-border ethnic comparisons, to explain why state-building failed in Myanmar’s borderlands. The underlying assumption common to these theories is that the state-building outcome is a product of favorable or unfavorable inputs, such as the state-builders’ political will and material capacity, as well as structural conditions in the target territory. Yet, as James Scott demonstrates in Seeing Like a State (1998), state-building is a complex endeavor that often fails, even when pursued by highly motivated and capable individuals and regardless of local conditions. Whether state-building actually succeeds in the formation of strong states is arguably as much, if not more, a function of how rulers go about this endeavor.

This question of “how” is precisely the focus of Strauss’s new book, which examines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) and the KMT’s parallel state-building campaigns after the CCP achieved territorial control over mainland China by defeating and exiling the KMT to Taiwan in 1949. Strauss demonstrates that, although the CCP and the KMT were ideologically polarized, they relied on similar instruments and strategies in establishing their authority over their subject populations. In particular, invoking the need for “Gramscian sensitivity to the impact of cultures and practices,” Strauss argues that to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the state-building process, it is necessary to “go beyond a Weberian focus on institutions to stress how the state’s administrative organizations make themselves visible and intelligible through different kinds of performances” (pp. 4–5).

This exploration of performative aspects of state-building proceeds in three parts, beginning with an examination of the CCP’s and the KMT’s discourses on the ideal bureaucrat and how their respective visions were performed through the process of recruiting new bureaucrats and purging holdover officials from the previous regime. Next Strauss turns in chapters 2 and 3 to the terror campaigns initiated by the CCP and the KMT to identify possible enemies of the state. These chapters provide detailed accounts on the substantive elements of the respective terror campaigns—who was targeted, why they were targeted, and the scale of the violence—but the emphasis of the analysis is again on the performances employed to advance state-building. For the CCP, the aim was to convey the centrality of the masses in the new political order: not only did the party represent the masses but also politics itself was to be a process of mass participation. In contrast, the terror campaign in Taiwan, although no less violent in lives ruined and lost, was performed in a way that advanced the image of the regime as embodying bureaucratic expertise and legalistic procedures. The subsequent chapters on land reform proceed similarly, as Strauss details both the substance of the reforms and the accompanying political performances.

Undergirded by extensive archival research, Strauss succeeds in demonstrating the CCP’s and the KMT’s use of performative instruments in their respective state-building efforts. Nonetheless, the book could have provided greater specificity on the causal process through which performances substantiate government authority and offered alternative explanations of the role performative instruments play in the state-building process. In her review of the literature on political performances, Strauss highlights the work of Jeffrey Alexander, who in turn identifies the purpose of performances as producing “emotional connection of audience with actor and text and thereby creat[ing] the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to audience” (Performance and Power, 2011, p. 53). Applied to the context of state-building, successful political performances instill new beliefs and values within society, convince the subject population of the authenticity of newly constructed political institutions, and make the political regime seem legitimate.

This argument is certainly a plausible explanation of how political performances contribute to state-building. However, this is not the only possible way performative instruments have been theorized to produce order and obedience. Competing approaches include those that regard performances as coercive instruments that condition public behavior rather than private beliefs and values, as well as those that see even unconvincing, and thus inauthentic, performances as buttressing the state’s authority by fostering ambivalence and political detachment to create a complacent citizenry. A detailed theoretical discussion of the causal process linking performances to state-building, along with the use of methodological techniques such as process tracing, would have allowed readers to assess the extent to which performances instilled new meanings and authenticated the new political order in China and Taiwan or whether they advanced the CCP’s and the KMT’s parallel state-building campaigns through other mechanisms.

Ultimately, although both Han’s and Straus’s books could have benefited from further theoretical elaboration, they are nonetheless important contributions to the discourse on state-building. Thoroughly researched and empirically informative, these books also point toward avenues for further innovation in the study of state-building, as we move away from its Eurocentric origins to a more comprehensive understanding of how different forms of modern political order developed across the globe.