In their book, Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lu ask three major questions: What has led to the huge tax and levy burden on China's peasants? Why has the central government not stopped it? Why has it not led to a major social movement in China? In addressing these issues, the authors have chosen to focus on “agricultural China,” the central and western provinces that, unlike the eastern coastal provinces of “industrializing rural China,” have not necessarily benefited from the many market-oriented reforms undertaken since the 1980s. It is in agricultural China that the central government has failed to match its exactions from the peasants with their capacity to pay. The one-policy-for-all approach to development policy has ignored the fact that local governments in this large region have lacked access to revenues generated by town and village enterprises. Further, the combination of the growth of centrally imposed “unfunded mandates” with the Center's “revenue sharing” policies that favor the richer coastal provinces (and Tibet) has compelled local governments in the interior provinces to impose taxes, fees, and fines.

The authors conclude that the central government's incentives to local governments to achieve its objectives are only sufficient to encourage local officials to develop their localities (providing career advancement for those who succeed). They are not sufficient to get local officials to meet its additional objective of lowering the tax burden. In any event, Beijing has given local governments an impossible task—developing without adequate revenues.

But why have these excessive tax burdens, catalogued exhaustively by the authors, not led to a social movement? Relying on local publications and press reports, the authors have pieced together a picture of peasant protest and resistance to excessive exactions in agricultural China. They contend that the Center, through numerous regulations, policies, and statements, has given the peasantry the strong impression that it stands on their side, against exploitation by local officials. Indeed, the Center has instituted a number of measures to protect peasants and to enable them to defend their interests. The authors provide a wealth of information about these measures and their impact on lessening the peasants' burden. Some of the most important are institutionalizing village elections; encouraging those with grievances to write letters and make visits to officials; and allowing local protests, media coverage of egregious cases, and lawsuits against officials responsible for grievances. As a result, peasant anger is directed not at Beijing but at local government officials. Finally, the policy initiated during the reform period of allowing peasants to migrate to the towns and cities offers disgruntled and desperate peasants an exit strategy. This, too, relieves the pressures that might otherwise lead to an organized social movement.

These instruments and policies have allowed peasants to articulate their interests and to channel and contain their anger, but the authors also note the many cultural and institutional reasons that (excessive) taxation has not led to a social movement. Not the least of these is that a linkage between urban and rural grievances is nonexistent, and is unlikely to surface in a society where potential urban organizers both distrust and disdain the peasantry. Further, rural leaders have been unable to transcend the primarily local issues involved in collective peasant protests in order to unite large areas of the countryside in a broad-based social movement because peas-ants believe that their “excessive” burdens are imposed by local governments, not Beijing.

Bernstein and Lu have set their study in China's historical and cultural context. They note that ad hoc levies had been a problem for more than two thousand years before the Communists came to power in 1949. They also note that the retention of certain post-1949 institutions, policies, and values once the communes were abandoned and agricultural reforms took hold in the 1980s led to a return of arbitrary levies. The authors conclude that local officials were squeezed by the Center's many demands, and that political culture and institutional arrangements played an important role in the resulting mismanagement, corruption, and excessive fees. At the same time, they expose the central government's dilemmas: It cannot afford to offend the politically powerful wealthier provinces by redistributing more of their wealth to the poorer provinces—and even if it could, it is unable to determine the actual distribution of wealth and poverty so that it can decide on an equitable tax structure. Furthermore, it has been unable to downsize the township bureaucracies, whose growing legions of officials are justified in the name of decentralization; yet their salaries can often only be paid by increasing fees, fines, and taxes on the local peasantry.

The reader must bear in mind that in spite of the title, this is a study purposefully limited to one part—the poorest part—of rural China. But Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China is so informative that it can only be hoped that the authors will now take on a study of “industrializing rural China.” The strength of the research is that it is not a mere case study but a broad regional investigation that allows them to put forth more general conclusions. Some of the authors' efforts to apply theoretical constructs to their study, such as trying to determine where China fits on the continuum from a “developmental state” to a “predatory state,” seem ill-conceived, reflective of their own biases about the Chinese government, and unnecessarily distorting of China's actual policies (e.g., comparing China to Zaire under Mobutu). A similar bias is reflected in their dismissal of such positive steps as the institutionalization of village elections, because they were primarily aimed at promoting rural stability rather than democracy for its own sake. Apart from failing to give the government credit for trying to maintain stability through elections rather than more coercive measures, they also fail to consider that it is rare indeed for any government to advance the cause of democracy without first doing a rational cost–benefit analysis of its impact on its own power.

The authors' application of social movement theory is more revelatory. But their real contribution is the presentation of some of the dilemmas China faces as a modernizing state, dilemmas that China shares with other states having to address the complicated interwoven issues of taxation, decentralization, and unfunded mandates. The study also indicates, without the authors ever saying so, that the ideology of communism plays a limited role as the Chinese government addresses the quotidian issues of development. Rather, tax policy must be understood as one aspect of pragmatic development planning carried out in the context of China's political culture, residual institutional arrangements, and limited resources.