Students of the local state in reform-era China behold a host of different forms. Scholarly research reports debate their defining characteristics, speculate about the political participatory and non-participatory possibilities each type seems to hold out for the future, scrutinize their implications for economic development or for income distribution, and ponder if the very plurality of local governance types now seen in play across the country will prove to be a durable or only a transitory state of affairs. In a recent, commendably lucid "state of the field" essay, Baum and Shevchenko grouped the many disparate observations and models to date into four main sorts: in their relationships to economic activity, local states have been found to be entrepreneurial, clientelist, predatory or developmental. 1 And *The authors are grateful to Lan Hai for energetic research assistance. 1. In entrepreneurial states, state agents and bureaucrats, even whole government bureaus, may go into business independently or enter into partnerships for profit; in clientelist states, officials promote and participate in the benefits of profit-making activity through personalized and particularistic ties to entrepreneurs in their localities; in predatory states, officials do not engage in business either directly or indirectly but utilize their positions instead to extract unproductive rents from producers and entrepreneurs through exorbitant fees, levies and fines; while in developmental states, officials intervene indirectly in the economy, "helping to plan, finance, and coordinate local projects, investing in local infrastructure, and promoting cooperative economic relations with external agencies." In developmental states, local officials create an environment conducive to growth while not, themselves, engaging in business for profit and while "avoiding the formation of particularistic ties to 'preferred' enterprises and clients." See Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko, "The state of the state," in Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 344-45. The entrepreneurial state model has had its fullest elaboration in Jane Duckett, The Entrepreneurial State in China (London: Routledge, 1998), but see also Yimin Lin and Zhanxin Zhang, "Backyard profit centers: the private assets of public agencies," in Jean C. Oi and Andrew G. Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 203-225. Clientelist state forms have been very widely reported. For just two urban examples, see Margaret M. Pearson, China's New Business Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and David L. Wank, "Bureaucratic patronage and private business: changing networks of power in urban China," in Andrew G. Walder (ed.), The Waning of the Communist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 153-183; and for a rural example, see Gregory A. Ruf, "Collective enterprise and property rights...
