In Somalia the boom in labor remittances inflows fueled a different type of informal economy. More specifically, while the oil boom period reduced the Somali state’s ability to regulate the economy as in Egypt and Sudan, the consequences of this development differed. In Somalia informal financial networks facilitated a thriving commercial sector comprised of firms oriented around clan families. It was not religious or class affiliations, but rather ethnic mobilization and conflict that became the most salient. This difference was due to two factors: the dearth of formally organized institutions (i.e., official banks, and publicly registered enterprises); and the fact that President Siad Barre pitted one clan against another in his search for legitimacy and financed a patronage system excluding clans and constituencies that opposed his rule. Thus, with the expansion of the parallel economy, the politics of ethnicity and personalistic networks quickly eclipsed the power of the state.

This chapter explores the ideas and political movements of the CYP in warlord China through three sections. The first section characterizes the CYP’s ideology by its cultural conservatism, political intellectualism, and integral nationalism based on a combination of transformed federalism and corporatism specific to the Chinese sociopolitical context, particularly through the ideological debates of the CYP founders with Communists between 1924 and 1927. The second section delves into the CYP’s mass political movements of different types. Finally, as a precondition for the CYP’s rapid development in north China and Manchuria, the third section explores how the CYP created friendly political environments by collaborating with leading regional warlords in different periods.

This chapter examines the CYP’s local construction in Sichuan between 1926 and 1937. Through its organization of the students and teachers in educational circles, its work with local gentry through the case of the Relief Committee (Anfu weiyuanui), and its quest for the support of local warlords, this chapter highlights the CYP’s successful local operations in Sichuan in this period. By so doing, this chapter helps readers understand the regional variations of China’s state construction during the Republican era.

In Somalia the boom in labor remittances inflows fueled a different type of informal economy. More specifically, while the oil boom period reduced the Somali state’s ability to regulate the economy as in Egypt and Sudan, the consequences of this development differed. In Somalia informal financial networks facilitated a thriving commercial sector comprised of firms oriented around clan families. It was not religious or class affiliations, but rather ethnic mobilization and conflict that became the most salient. This difference was due to two factors: the dearth of formally organized institutions (i.e., official banks, and publicly registered enterprises); and the fact that President Siad Barre pitted one clan against another in his search for legitimacy and financed a patronage system excluding clans and constituencies that opposed his rule. Thus, with the expansion of the parallel economy, the politics of ethnicity and personalistic networks quickly eclipsed the power of the state.

The Tang dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, was typical of China’s great imperial regimes in that it owed its creation to successful military action and saw its subsequent fortunes shaped to a very great extent by events on the battlefield; when its military power waned the dynasty faltered, and when that power had dissipated completely it fell. In the Tang, as under earlier and later dynasties, the ruling elites were intensely interested in matters of military policy and strategy, with military expenditures claiming the largest portion of the state’s revenues. For the Tang, as for all of the other dynasties, the image of Confucian sage kings ruling by moral suasion, without reference to force of arms, belongs to the realm of myth rather than reality.