In Small Works, John Donaldson sets out to explain the curious fact that despite experiencing slower economic growth than neighbouring Yunnan Province, Guizhou has been more successful at reducing poverty. While Yunnan has outperformed Guizhou in the reform era in terms of GDP growth, net rural incomes in poor Yunnan counties have lagged significantly behind those in Guizhou. Yunnan's growth, in other words, has failed to “trickle down” to benefit the poor. After a systematic consideration of a raft of explanatory factors – demographic, cultural, economic, and political variables – Donaldson settles on four seemingly unrelated factors that nevertheless offer the most robust keys to understanding the puzzle of poverty reduction without economic growth. These are road types and densities, out-migration patterns, tourism development strategies, and coal mining. The differences in each of these factors between Yunnan and Guizhou offer Donaldson important insights toward a broader explanation of successful poverty reduction in Guizhou. As his title suggests, Donaldson concludes that whereas Yunnan has pursued the large-scale growth agenda characteristic of a developmental state, Guizhou's strategy has been that of what he calls a “micro-oriented state” whereby poverty is treated as a technical problem best tackled by small-scale interventions in which the poor directly participate and derive immediate income benefits. Guizhou's “basic human needs” approach, Donaldson argues, has been largely pragmatic (rather than ideologically driven) given the province's limited capacity to invest in large-scale growth projects. In other words, Donaldson is careful with his conclusions, recognizing that the “small is beautiful” model suggested by Guizhou does not necessarily reflect a progressive agenda of redistributive justice on the part of the Party-state.

Still, his findings allow Donaldson to offer some useful analysis on the broader relationship between poverty reduction and economic growth. Over the past couple of decades now the so-called neoliberal “Washington consensus” has insisted that economic growth is the most important strategy for reducing poverty. The World Bank's China and Mongolia country director, David Dollar, for instance, made a name for himself by arguing that economic growth translates directly into increased incomes for the poor at a ratio of one-to-one. His argument, among others, has been used to advocate for entirely market-based approaches to poverty reduction in which state interference is kept at a minimum. Donaldson's careful study presents a compelling challenge to Dollar's neoliberal approach.

Donaldson argues that by constructing more inexpensive dirt roads, Guizhou's highway investments contributed to poverty reduction by connecting more poor farmers to local markets. But such roads contribute little to economic growth. Yunnan's road building, in contrast, focused on large-scale expressways linking major urban and industrial centres, contributing to growth but doing little to benefit the poor. Poor people migrated out of Guizhou at a much higher rate than they did in Yunnan. Donaldson's argument here is that labour migrants contribute more to the economic growth of the places they migrate to and that while their remittances benefit their poor families they contribute little to economic growth in their home regions. As for tourism, Donaldson argues that it was primarily aimed in Guizhou at combating rural poverty, whereas in Yunnan it focused on large-scale capital intensive development. And while both provinces have rich coal reserves, Guizhou had a much higher number of dispersed, small-scale mines that contributed directly to incomes in poor regions while Yunnan's coal industry was dominated by large-scale mines. Guizhou mines were small, dangerous and inefficient. They contributed little to provincial economic growth, but did make a difference in poverty relief.

What makes Small Works compelling, and ultimately convincing, is the thoroughness of Donaldson's methodology, his willingness to consider a broad range of possible explanations for the observed discrepancies between Yunnan and Guizhou, and his patient articulation of a clear path toward understanding the puzzle of poverty reduction without economic growth. Having witnessed a great deal of rural Guizhou's poverty myself over the past quarter century of fieldwork there, I admit that I approached Small Works with considerable scepticism. Given the levels of incompetence, corruption and passive resignation that I have seen on the part of many officials there, the idea that the Guizhou provincial government was deliberately following a poverty abatement strategy that was more effective and more appropriate compared to neighbouring Yunnan was not a claim I was prepared to readily accept. In particular, I found the claim that tourism development in Guizhou was one of the key factors explaining poverty reduction there to fly in the face of much of my own research on the many kinds of alienation visited upon Guizhou villagers in the hands of the tourism industry there. What Donaldson views as a deliberate poverty reduction strategy in tourism – for example a focus on small-scale village tourism – is, in my view, more the result of efforts by villagers themselves to aggressively claim benefits that the tourism industry has itself been reluctant to offer.

While I'm therefore not sure the Guizhou government deserves the credit that Donaldson allows for deliberately implementing a “micro-oriented” model of poverty alleviation, his analysis itself is indeed convincing. Small Works is a rewarding and important book and offers an excellent contribution to the fields of rural development and poverty within and beyond China.