State Involution: A Study of Local Finances in North China, 1911–1935

Abstract

Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese state launched onto a course of development that seemed to resemble the process in early modern Europe that Charles Tilly and others have called state making (Tilly 1975). The phenomenon of an expanding state structure penetrating levels of society untouched before, subordinating, co-opting, or destroying the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities in a bid to increase its command of local resources, appeared to be repeating itself in late imperial and republican China. The similarities include the impulse toward centralization, bureaucratization, and rationalization; the insatiable drive to increase revenues for both military and civilian purposes; the violent resistance of local communities to this inexorable process of intrusion and extraction; and the formation of alliances between the state and local elites to consolidate their power (Duara 1983).