This chapter addresses the widespread perception that rural politics are characterized by irrational antigovernment sentiment, right-wing conspiracy theories, and other ideological drivers. This perception includes the stereotype that rural residents are generally conservatives who “vote against their interests” when liberal policies might appear to help their communities more. The chapter argues that rural views on government are just as often rational reactions to the unique impacts of law, regulation, and government in rural communities. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the chapter argues that rural grievances toward the federal regulatory state specifically reflect predictable concerns relating to procedural justice, substantive outcomes, and a sense that agencies prioritize concerns other than rural residents’ concerns. Although rural views vary, and intersect with other identities such as race, diverse rural populations exhibit common concerns about agencies posing threats to livelihoods and failing to offer protection from environmental threats. The chapter argues that overlap between subjective rural sentiments and objective structural features of the regulatory state lend credence to rural views as not irrational. Barriers to public participation in agency rulemaking, regulatory cost–benefit analysis, and implementation of the Endangered Species Act all illustrate instances of the regulatory state often failing to take meaningful rural concerns seriously.

The chapter, termed Legalized Politicization Era (2010–present), examines the role of law in securing a new political–economic equilibrium. In this era, the consequences of state capitalism, China’s economic turning point, and a legitimacy crisis in the Party-state’s rule, advanced the use of law in two directions: intensifying the presence of the regulatory state in the market on the one hand while shifting market governance powers directly to the CCP itself on the other. The chapter describes how in these developments the law has been assigned a meaningful and more explicit role in steering capital flows and structuring markets. It argues that taking notice of the two functions of law has become ever more relevant.

This chapter presents the book’s third case study, exploring how state transformation shapes China’s international development financing (DF) policymaking and implementation. DF is often seen as an instrument of economic statecraft, strategically deployed to advance China’s geopolitical interests. Contrarily, we show that authority and policymaking is fragmented and contested among central agencies, producing weak oversight for implementing state-owned enterprises, which have primarily pecuniary motives and scant regard for official Chinese diplomatic goals. DF projects thus emerge not from a ‘top-down’ strategy but in a ‘bottom-up’ way, reflecting the agency of buccaneering SOEs and recipient-country elites. The outcomes of DF projects – and whether they benefit China’s international relations – depend on how the specific interests on both sides intersect, as we show through comparative case studies of hydropower development in Cambodia and Myanmar. In Cambodia, Chinese DF was managed by a dominant-party regime in ways that bolstered its domination, generating warmer ties with Beijing. In Myanmar, however, socio-political fragmentation meant that similar projects exacerbated social conflict and even sparked renewed civil war, prompting a crisis in bilateral relations.

This chapter introduces the book and its main arguments. It first discusses the International Relations debate over China’s rise, and its limitations. The debate is polarised between those depicting China as a revisionist actor, or as supporting the status quo. The debate is at an impasse because evidence exists on both sides. What is needed is a framework that can account for both sorts of behaviour. This requires rejecting the assumption that China is a monolithic actor pursuing a coherent grand strategy. In reality, since the late 1970s, the Chinese party-state has become fragmented, decentralised and internationalised, greatly expanding the range of actors involved in China’s foreign affairs. Because these actors are only loosely coordinated within a Chinese-style regulatory state, this produces a wide range of international outcomes that do not necessarily reflect top leaders’ intentions. The chapter also outlines the structure and contents of the rest of the book.

This chapter presents the book’s first case study: the South China Sea (SCS). Typically, the SCS is seen as a geopolitical struggle for sovereignty and territory, prompting military tensions and power balancing, and as a major security flashpoint that could spark World War III. This chapter shows that Chinese conduct in the SCS is shaped less by a detailed strategy determined in Beijing and more by struggles for power and resources within the transformed Chinese party-state. Reflecting the model described in Chapter One, Chinese conduct is only loosely guided by the poorly-defined nine-dash line and an injunction to balance the maintenance of stability and the protection of maritime rights, which are often contradictory objectives. This has created wide latitude for maritime actors – including the navy, coastguard agencies, the national oil companies and the Hainan provincial government and associated fishing interests – to promote their sectional interests, with often very negative consequences for China’s wider diplomatic objectives. Xi Jinping’s efforts to rein in competing actors has only partially succeeded. Although China’s position in the SCS has overall strengthened, it has done so in a rather unplanned manner and consequently at considerable cost.

This chapter presents the book’s second case study: Chinese efforts to manage ‘non-traditional’ security issues in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It focuses on the challenges of illegal narcotics and associated criminal activity, particularly banditry on the Mekong river, to which China has become more exposed through its ‘reform and opening up’. Contrary to widespread assumptions that ‘Westphalian’ China is leery of undermining sovereignty, we show that Chinese agencies have actually moved to tackle these problems at source by sponsoring opium-substitution programmes and transboundary law-enforcement projects in Laos and Myanmar. The outcomes of these interventions depend on how Chinese party-state transformation dynamics interact with socio-political conflicts in these target states. On the Chinese side, opium-substitution has been hijacked by local cadre-capitalists in Yunnan province, skewing implementation towards their sectional interests. This has intersected with predatory social relations in Myanmar and Laos to undermine drug-suppression efforts. Conversely, Chinese central government agencies have had greater success in corralling neighbouring counterparts into a transnational policing network, recently cemented into a new international organisation, the Lancang-Mekong Law Enforcement and Security Centre.

The concluding chapter draws out the implications of our findings for scholars and policymakers. First, it identifies key patterns in our findings and proposes hypotheses for further research. Inductively, it suggests that the degree of Chinese policy coherence reflects whether coordinating mechanisms are deployed and effective, and whether powerful domestic interests align. It argues that our conceptualisation of the Chinese party-state does not necessarily mean that Chinese behaviour is unproblematic – but that it may emerge for reasons not anticipated by traditional models. And it emphasises the crucial importance of partner/recipient countries in shaping the outcomes of Chinese overseas engagements. Secondly, the chapter draws out recommendations for policymakers in China and elsewhere. We argue that responding to China’s rise as though it was a strategically guided monolith is clearly mistaken, requiring a more nuanced and sophisticated approach. We also urge Chinese policymakers to be more open about the limitations of Chinese governance and to attempt more decisive state reforms. In a final postscript, we offer some thoughts about what light the state transformation framework can shed on the COVID-19 pandemic.

This chapter elaborates the theoretical and methodological approach used in this book. Guided by Gramscian state theory, we trace the post-1978 rise of a powerful, though divided, cadre-capitalist class, and the associated, uneven and contested fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of China’s party-state. We then elaborate a theoretical model capable of explaining how policymaking and implementation work under these changed conditions: the Chinese-style regulatory state. In this model, rather than making detailed, binding decisions and strategies, top leaders try to loosely steer and coordinate a plethora of actors towards favoured ends. But other actors can influence, interpret and even ignore these policy frameworks. Chinese behaviours thus represent an ongoing struggle within the fractured party-state. Outcomes are further shaped by socio-political dynamics within the other countries in which Chinese actors operate. The chapter also explains our method and case selection, and canvasses and rejects some predictable objections to our argument: that China’s state transformation is nothing new, and that recentralisation under Xi Jinping has made the state transformation argument outdated.

This chapter argues that changes to the academic labour process have fundamentally deskilled or deprofessionalized academic labour. The chapter is based on a neo-Marxist appraisal of the proletarianization of academic labour. We argue, first, that universities in Anglosphere countries have become commodified due to the privatization of their funding. Second, the decline in public funding and rise of student fees has resulted in a decomposition of academic labour that minimizes costs and increases the surplus from student fees. Third, the capacity of the state and universities to break down the skills of academic labour is enhanced and then restructured in terms of market veridiction. In the process universities become corporatized and locked into a state regulatory regime that interpellates and cajoles academics into that market-driven mission. Lastly, the chapter contends that academics are alienated from their labour and proletarianized in the process, though they do show forms of resistance which can be regarded as ‘weapons of the weak’ to counterattack the commodification process, and they rely on the remnants of professionalism to defend their conditions.