In Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia, Kristen E. Looney offers a compelling theory of state-led mobilization campaigns that sought to develop and transform the countryside in Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980–2000s). In each case, the state faced an accumulation of negative ramifications from industrial policy, urban bias, a countryside in decline, and rural unrest; in each case, it responded with a mobilization campaign that sought to increase agricultural production and modernize living standards and village infrastructure by “bringing paved roads, electricity, clean water, and trash collection services to poor and isolated communities” (p. 35). The results were startlingly different. Looney’s book explains why.

This is a vitally important contribution that challenges deeply engrained “Western ideas about the illiberal and destructive tendencies of campaigns” (p. 5), which underpin a broader argument that any “state intervention, especially through campaigns, is inherently destructive” (p. 48). Although Looney cautions that “conditions necessary for campaign success are rare” (p. 157), she also highlights the ways in which even flawed campaigns improved people’s lives. This nuanced account of mobilization is a breath of fresh air in the miasma of state-phobia, which clouds how state intervention is conceptualized and evaluated in mainstream discussions of political economy. For Looney, mobilization has more in common with Leninism and Maoism than with the technocratic governance of the developmental state, which suggests a complex, nonlinear account of the coexistence of “different strands of political culture” (p. 156). A state can be many things at once. Although she avoids directly engaging in normative debates, her empirical findings open a space for critical reflection on the state’s role in the development of remote rural areas where capital does not flow of its own volition. In an age in which zones of abandonment proliferate, and state intervention may be the difference between “making live or letting die,” as anthropologist Tania Murray Li puts it, Looney’s book constructs an important framework by asking, under what conditions is rural mobilization likely to succeed and when is it likely to go awry?

She answers this question by unfolding the following argument: “rural modernization campaigns are more likely to work, that is produce policy compliance and positive outcomes, when the state’s goal is rural development rather than extraction, when the central government can control local authorities, and when the campaign is carried out in partnership with rural citizens” (p. 33; emphasis in the original). Supporting this elegant formula is a dense scaffolding of historical detail, ranging from the inheritance of Japanese colonialism, legacies of land reform, involvement of the United States, political insecurities forged in the shadow of the Cold War, regional policy diffusion, role of local institutions, and autonomy of farmers’ organizations, to name just a few factors.

If we take a closer look at the Taiwanese case, Looney’s finding is extraordinary: Taiwan’s anticommunist, authoritarian state was an exemplar of Leninist/Maoist-style campaign mobilization. But how? Looney explains that the key to Taiwan’s success resided in the role played by Taiwan’s Farmers’ Associations (FA) described as “Leninist transmission belt organizations that actually incorporated farmers’ interests” (p. 51). FAs promoted rural development on the basis of their linkage with and autonomy from higher-level state institutions. On the one hand, farmers participated in FAs by electing their leadership—almost all of whom were professional farmers—and felt a sense of ownership over the organizations. On the other hand, as parastatal organizations, FAs were able to leverage and convey farmers’ concerns and grievances to central government officials. In Taiwan, mobilization occurred in an authoritarian context in which the state elicited compliance from officials, while being responsive to local conditions, needs, and feedback. The presence of mass participation distinguishes Taiwan’s successful campaign experience and results from the cases of South Korea and China.

In South Korea, the mixed record of the New Village Movement was due to its political-institutional context: a strong state with weak rural institutions. The state set unrealistic expectations and attached political importance to their implementation, which prevented input from rural society. Although the campaign, like in Taiwan, impressively transformed village infrastructure—providing electricity, roads, sewage systems, and roofs—its coercive requirement that farmers cultivate Tong’il (unification), a high-yield variety of rice, failed spectacularly, because the taste did not appeal to consumers and rapid diffusion of the crop made it vulnerable to disease and failure. The New Village Movement significantly improved people’s living standards but fell short of its ambitions mainly due to the lack of mass involvement.

In her chapter on China’s rural development strategy of “building a new socialist countryside” (which was a campaign in everything but name), Looney points to the absence of conditions that contributed to the success of Taiwan and South Korea’s campaigns. Unlike the FAs in Taiwan, China’s Farmers’ Professional Cooperatives (FPCs) are relatively powerless and geographically segmented, lack connections with higher levels of the state, and are alienated from local society. Unlike South Korea’s New Village Movement in which pressure from above ensured (perhaps too rigidly) policy compliance, China’s political system in the reform era is “one of the most decentralized countries in the world” (p. 39). China’s “unusual combination of strong mobilization capacity and weak bureaucratic oversight” (p. 37), coupled with the absence of mass participation and supervision from below, promotes a high degree of “discretionary local authority” (p. 38). Operating in a simultaneously rigid and fluid institutional environment, local officials often selectively interpret policies in ways that significantly depart from the original intentions of the center. As Looney convincingly argues, local implementation of the central government’s objective to improve the countryside “gradually became synonymous with concentrated housing and mass demolitions” (p. 147) and provided ideological cover for rural resource extraction in the form of land grabs. The plan to save the countryside resulted in its urbanization.

Looney’s argument resonates with my own research on the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Post-earthquake reconstruction was an example of crisis mobilization designed to achieve, in the Chinese Communist Party’s words, a “great leap of development” in less than two years of breakneck reconstruction activity. The political imperative to display the party’s benevolence and demonstrate success, however, reduced the beneficiaries of reconstruction to passive spectators. The reconstruction appeared to them as an image project that did not cater to their specific needs and conditions. Here, too, the shortcoming of the Communist Party was not excessive centralization but the abuse of local power in the absence of mass participation. When I read Looney’s account of how Taiwan’s Community Development campaign was “implemented in a relatively flexible and participatory manner” (p. 75), I felt like she had uncovered the Holy Grail of the Maoist mass line, with the irony that she found it in Taiwan.

Looney may be right in her conclusion that the raft of unique historical and institutional conditions in these East Asian countries render their reproducibility in other circumstances unlikely. On a more optimistic note, perhaps there can be different configurations of the same theme, because the need to transform the world in which we live is not going away anytime soon.