In Tax Reform in Rural China, Hiroki Takeuchi puts rural governance reforms into the larger context of center-local relations under China's authoritarian governance structure of the 1990s and early 2000s, arguing that tax reform needs to be understood as an attempt by the central government to maintain an authoritarian system at the expense of local rural governments more than a response to the actual problem of excess peasant burden. In other words, in order to maintain an authoritarian system the central government chose not to expand political reforms at the local level—which might have led to good governance and a better provision of public goods—and instead used the local governments as scapegoats for rural problems that were of central origin.

The book is divided into two sections. The first discusses issues surrounding rural revenue and resistance from analytical and historical perspectives. In the second, Takeuchi develops formal game-theoretic models to predict the behavior of rural actors (primarily the local government and villagers—usually taken as a unified block). Part 2 makes Takeuchi's contribution distinctive. Both parts make use of interviews, informal conversations, and official documents as well secondary sources to enrich the analysis.

Chapter 1 looks at the general problem of rural governance, revenue, and center-local relations. Crucial is the divergence between industrializing villages and poorer agricultural ones, with the former continuing to be able to fund public goods even while the central state took a greater share of taxes after 1994. Chapters 2 and 3 entail a historical perspective on revenue, resistance, and authoritarian rule. The most interesting argument that emerges in these chapters is that the opportunity to migrate seems to be one of the most crucial factors in deciding how local governments will act. As the financial situation of local rural governments worsened throughout the 1990s, the state imposed more mandates upon them and urban migration expanded. This put the local level in poorer regions in an impossible position. Increasing protest against taxation followed, and the local government received the majority of the blame. Finally, tax reform led to a reduction in peasant burdens and the end of the agricultural tax. Chapter 4 covers the aftermath, looking at the survival strategies of local states and in particular the familiar shift from reliance on “predatory taxation to land trade” (p. 80).

The game-theoretic models developed in part 2 attempt to predict the behavior of rural actors within the context of center-local relations. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on migration, the petition system, and village elections respectively. Each includes an appendix with a formal description of the model used. The rigorous analytical discussion of these chapters does a good job laying out the interaction of competing interests and behaviors under different conditions. The conclusions sometimes reach beyond the parameters of the models, for example when Takeuchi concludes that “the real institutionalization of the petition system will give substantive legitimacy to petitions, which in turn will bring social stability and good governance to rural China” (p. 121). Thus, while Takeuchi is quite pessimistic about the actual chance of political reforms in the countryside materializing, he sometimes seems too optimistic about the ability of institutionalized political participation to solve rural problems.

Despite the fact that the main argument concerns the motives of the “authoritarian” central state, Takeuchi does not directly investigate such motives, instead opting to support the argument by looking at the effects and contradictions of rural policies. The meaning of the term “authoritarianism,” likewise, seems to be assumed and remains somewhat abstract. Attention to the shifting and contingent political process of the actual tax reforms might be helpful, but there is no detailed narrative of the tax reforms themselves. This is curious for a book entitled Tax Reform in Rural China. In fact, tax reform is not the main issue for Takeuchi. The book mainly concerns the relationship between the motivation of local governments to provide public goods and other political issues (taxation, opportunities to migrate, government legitimacy, center-local political relations and the cadre responsibility system, degree of economic development, the institutionalization of remonstrative political practices, village elections, and rural protest). However one wants to characterize the relationship between these different issues or factors—and Takeuchi's approach is sophisticated on these relationships—taxation seems at best to be one factor among many, and it often does not seem to be as decisive as others, in particular, for example, the opportunity for migration. Notably, taxation is not the center of analysis in any of the chapters in part 2, where it largely drops from view. That said, this is an innovative and comprehensive look at the problems of rural governance, one that will appeal primarily to China specialists and more generally to political scientists interested in the local dynamics of governance in nondemocratic states.