Lynn White teaches in the Woodrow Wilson School, Politics Department, and East Asian Studies Program at Princeton. His previous books include Careers in Shanghai, about urban citizens during socialist consolidation in the 1950s. Policies of Chaos explores the causes of violence in Shanghai's Cultural Revolution during the 1960s. Unstately Power follows these into China's reform era, which he dates from the early 1970s, and further into the Yangzi Delta; the first volume of this book won the Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Award. For each period, as for the comparative China-Southeast Asia book in your hands, White explains political patterns by looking locally at both intended norms and unintended contexts, both for individuals and for larger groups. Lynn has also published articles about cross-Strait relations, Chinese leadership, and identity politics. He hopes to contribute toward the development of liberal study that is less implicitly American than is most recent political science.

Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle "classes" promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people? This book, unlike previous books, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political, not just economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the aforementioned countries. Violence has been common in these politics, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the role of local money and power (above all, from small- and medium-sized firms that emerged after agrarian reforms) on elections and justice, this book asks democrats squarely to face the extent to which electoral procedures have failed to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.