State and agents in China : disciplining government officials /

Cai (Hong Kong Univ.) has used comprehensive data from throughout China's many provinces, and from the central to town and village level, to provide a vivid portrait of China's disciplining of government and party officials. Cai investigates the important question of how the Chinese authoritarian state maintains its control through flexibility, punishing some officials but not others. Officials are more likely to be punished if the consequences of their malfeasance were serious and if they engaged in malfeasance for their own personal aggrandizement, rather than in pursuit of state-mandated policies (such as fulfilling the targets of the one-child policy or advancing economic development in their jurisdiction). Cai shows how difficult the calculus is for the party-state as it faces the dilemma of wanting to control malfeasance in order to maintain the party-state's legitimacy, yet not wanting to have the sanctioning of its agents turn into the socially and politically destructive mass movements or witch hunts of the past. The study also examines the strategies that officials adopt to avoid discipline, which can ruin a career and even lead to the death penalty. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Suzanne Ogden, Northeastern University