In Roots of the State, Benjamin Read provides an in-depth and cross-sectional analysis of neighbourhood organizations, which he regards as a form of “administrative grassroots engagement.” The social networks built upon the neighbourhood organization and informal everyday services provided at the neighbourhood level, according to the author, form the “roots of the state.” Read goes beyond the state–society dichotomy and zooms in on local urban spaces to reveal the foundation of state governance. His work is an impressive extension of our understanding of neighbourhood lives and state governance in socialist mainland China as described by Whyte, Parish and Walder.
The comparisons of Beijing and Taipei, as well as other cities in East and South-East Asia, are particularly fascinating as through comparison the study discovers a new dimension of governance models. These cases are compared through the degree of internal democracy and the administrative tasks taken from the state. An interesting finding is that, despite remarkable differences between “democratic electoral procedures of Taipei and the tightly controlled pseudoelection of Beijing,” the citizens of these two cities perceive these institutions very similarly (p. 91). In the context of recent efforts by the state to strengthen “community building” in mainland China, this study provides a timely contribution to how the grassroots administration works.
As a political scientist, Read adopts a rigorous research method which is described in the book's first appendix. The qualitative interview data were collected through multiple visits to these neighbourhoods in the study, which are detailed in the introductory chapter. The quantitative data are drawn from two questionnaire surveys in these two cities. The Beijing survey was conducted through in-home visits and the Taipei survey used random sampled telephone interviews, which respectively generated 1,018 and 1,140 sampled interviewees in these two cities. In addition, the author has also visited other cities in the mainland to set the study in context.
The book begins with an introduction to the conceptual framework behind his interfacing of state and society in neighbourhoods. The specificity of neighbourhood organizations in East and South-East Asia is stressed – in contrast to forms of self-contained, small-scale neighbourhood activities in the United States. These neighbourhood organizations form a “dense network of standardized cells, with state-defined boundaries” (p. 3) and undertake a wide range of functions from verification of welfare eligibility and household registration to political mobilization. Yet, Benjamin Read resists the temptation of a Foucauldian framework to see them merely as state arms and explores how the state encounters the governed through creating, sponsoring and managing grassroots engagement – which is precisely captured by the root metaphor. The chapter also briefly mentions “private governance” in homeowner associations, especially in so-called “gated communities.” This thread may provide a useful connection between specific Chinese neighbourhood governance research and a wide field of urban studies in the future.
Chapter two then reviews the evolution of society control in the form of the baojia system of imperial China to the present day. It provides a snapshot of the organizational structure of residents' committees (RCs) in mainland China and lizhang in Taiwan, and describes their administrative activities, which range from conveying information from the state, facilitating welfare programmes, listening to residents and conveying their requests upward, to providing small services. Chapter three further describes the procedure through which neighbourhood leaders are selected, revealing the intervention from upper government in Beijing and more open election in Taipei. Chapter four examines power relations at the alley level, and relate these organizations to their respective government structures. In Beijing, the members of RCs are appointed or in fact employed by the street office, while in Taipei lizhang have a more independent political standing in the state rubric. Chapter five examines the perceptions of residents towards neighbourhood organizations and their interaction in neighbourhoods. In contrast to a more coercive role of RCs described by those who left the mainland in Mao-era China to go to Hong Kong where they were interviewed, the survey shows a more complex picture – more than 60 per cent in both cities replied that they were fairly or very satisfied. Through detailed statistical analysis, Read shows individual-level variation, for example, in both cities the perception of usefulness declines along with the rising income of households. The variation of housing types (e.g. low-rise versus high-rise) is also identified. At this point, it would be interesting to show the variation of neighbourhood types, connecting to the earlier thread of private governance, to see whether a particular type of residence may give rise to a different approach to neighbourhood governance. The comparison of Beijing and Taipei, despite structural differences, shows the variation of neighbourhood governance in degrees rather than in kinds.
Chapters six and seven respectively investigate the development of “thick networks” built from state-mobilized volunteers and the “thin networks” through the “appeals of organic statism” where the boundary between the state and society becomes fuzzy. These chapters provide microscopic and everyday-life accounts of the functionality of neighbourhood organizations which are not in the remit of state surveillance and control. However, the horizontal networks built at the most local level help lay down the social basis of state governance. Finally, chapter eight extends the comparison of Beijing and Taipei to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and also Cuba. The findings from these two cities are broadly reminiscent of the general pattern of local governance.
Read's book fills the gaps in our knowledge of the most microscopic governance, and provides extensive data analyses. Through these analyses the comparison is thorough, leading to some well-founded but surprising findings. To my knowledge, the book is the most exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of Chinese neighbourhood organizations, paving a path towards understanding the transformation of urban China: the micro-structures such as work-units (danwei) and communities (shequ) may well be the clue. The contributions of Read's book cross political science, China studies and urban studies, and researchers in all these fields will find the narrative and evidence fascinating and mind-opening.
