State Formation in China and Taiwan, Julia C. Strauss's careful and detailed account of state building in China and Taiwan after 1949, relies on a wealth of archival materials from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Strauss finds both major differences and surprising continuities between the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the mainland and the Kuomintang (KMT) after its escape to Taiwan. By comparing the CCP's activities in Sunan—China's most affluent and industrialized region when the CCP arrived in Shanghai in 1949—to the KMT's after its retreat to Taiwan, Strauss constructs a plausible comparative case design to compare the processes of state building by two outsider regimes seeking to govern areas of roughly comparable size.

Strauss starts from the premise that both the PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan are examples of successful state building and seeks to understand the techniques that enabled each regime to succeed. Some might take issue with this premise. Strauss defines success as each Party-state's ability to achieve “the core tasks it set itself” (p. 245), but each regime's failures in this regard were as notable as its successes: Chiang Kai-shek's obsession with retaking control of the mainland never came to fruition, and the CCP would appear much less successful if the book were extended to include the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. Nonetheless, Strauss makes a convincing case that both regimes set out to accomplish three core state-building tasks and were largely successful in doing so: recruiting and training workers to staff the new Party-state (chapter 1), using terror and coercion to combat real and perceived subversion and to consolidate regime support (chapters 2 and 3), and upending the economic structure of the countryside through land reform (chapters 4 and 5).

The common wisdom suggests that the KMT ruled Taiwan through strong bureaucratic institutions, whereas the CCP depended much more heavily on mass mobilization campaigns. Strauss effectively complicates this narrative by showing that campaign and bureaucratic modalities of state building are, in fact, deeply intertwined. On the mainland, seemingly grassroots campaigns depended on careful preparation by cadres, followed written rules and procedures, and helped strengthen the bureaucracy by extending its reach into the countryside and growing the ranks of regime supporters. In Taiwan, campaigns were also used to identify and eliminate potential threats to the regime and transform the distribution of land in rural Taiwan. While these KMT-led campaigns depended less on social mobilization than those on the mainland, Strauss effectively shows that bureaucratic and campaign modalities—rather than existing in opposition—were entwined and mutually reinforcing for both the KMT and the CCP. 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.Footnote 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). For both regimes, the rhetoric, propaganda materials, and trials associated with the use of terror served “not just to rid the polity of enemies and subversives, but also to demonstrate the state's unchallengeable authority and moral basis in so doing” (p. 143). 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). Performance was also a central element of land reform. CCP cadres used land reform “as a real-life action drama that culminated in the triumph of good over evil” (p. 170)—even though in reality, economic relations in rural Sunan bore little resemblance to the rigid and exploitative relationships between landlords and peasants that the CCP sought to dramatize. In Taiwan, land reform served to dramatize the KMT's ability to improve upon its poor performance in rural China as well as its peaceful, orderly, and technocratic approach to rural governance. Ultimately, Strauss's narrative depicts a confident and forward-looking CCP regime convinced that the public would embrace the new regime once they learned about it—a stark contrast to the KMT, whose “reactive and defensive” (p. 144) performances reflected the Party-state's obsession with redeeming itself after its failures on the mainland and proving itself to be more effective than the CCP.

While the similarities between Sunan and Taiwan enable a productive comparison, this comparison also draws the reader's attention away from some important differences that might come to the fore if Strauss had chosen to compare Taiwan with mainland China as a whole. Most notably, the significant political and personal differences between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek receive little attention in the book. Mao's antipathy toward bureaucracy and preference for mass mobilization—both as a tool for governing and as a means of increasing his own power—surely affected the particular constellation of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that came to dominate in the PRC, but this topic is addressed only briefly in the concluding chapter. The book would also have been enriched by a clearer account of how historical context shaped each regime's choices. For example, Strauss describes the KMT's use of semicompetitive local elections as an important tool of rural state building but overlooks the ways in which these elections built upon institutional foundations laid during the Japanese colonial period. 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.