15 - Regimes and Repertoires of State Building

Summary

How do new states with unproven capacity and weak bases in society generate the capacity to sustain themselves and implement core programs? The revolutionary People’s Republic of China and its rival, the conservative Republic of China/Taiwan in the middle of the 20th century provide a paired comparison to suggest one set of answers to this question. This chapter posits that despite their strong mutual hostility, regimes as ideologically different as the PRC/ ROC-Taiwan both resorted to two fundamental strategies by which to generate state capacity: the bureaucratic and the campaign. The chapter analyses the ways in which both the young PRC and ROC/Taiwan drew upon similar repertoire for bureaucracy and campaign in implementing land reform, and charts the ways in which they distinguished themselves by performing quite different repertoires in the final implementation of land reform.