Urbanization and Historical Change in China

Historians used to believe that the Chinese imperial state was powerful enough to extend direct control over the lives of all its people, taxing them unmercifully and bending them by force to its will. We now know that in fact the Qing bureaucracy that ruled China from 1644 until 191 1 was a relatively weak extractive and coercive organization, at least during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' This discovery has encouraged scholars to turn their attention away from the Chinese court and provincial administration, and down toward the local level, where the vision of a unified polity gives way rapidly to a highly varied landscape of local cultures and peoples. As they discarded old conceptions of a monolithic, authoritarian state, China scholars in the United States began turning to other paradigms and metaphors to analyze and describe China's presocialist society. Specifically, they began looking beyond the formal structures of governmental authority to other patterns of action and thought in modern Chinese history. One of the