This chapter presents a concept of office as the central, organising concept in public law. Public law is, effectively, the law of public offices. An office is a stable, institutionalised social role tantamount to an artificial legal person that is occupied by a person from time to time in virtue of which that person acts ‘outside themselves’ and for the political community as a whole. This is the key to understanding the law of judicial review, which is uniquely concerned with this official mode of action. The concept of office has languished at the margins of public law theory since the nineteenth century reform of the English civil service. Its reinstatement is essential to understand the judicial review of official action beyond statute, and would reinvigorate and enrich public law theory more broadly as well – up to and including the foundation of a powerful conception of the rule of law.

This chapter identifies the book’s two basic aims: (1) explaining what policy makers and scholars interested in building tax capacity in developing countries may learn from the Chinese experience; and (2) articulating a framework for understanding the politics of taxation in China. It then explains how the unique approach of the book, which focuses on ground-level tax administration, serves these two aims. In relation to the first aim, the book will argue that contrary to assumptions in the current literature, there are fundamentally different types of state capacity in taxation, which follow potentially irreconcilable choices in the face of difficult trade-offs. In relation to the second aim, the book uses the structure of tax administration to illustrate the heterogeneity of political incentives within the Chinese state, critical information bottlenecks, and the political motives behind invocations of law. Unifying the pursuit of these two aims is a reflective conception of law as a special form of securing social order, which sees legal ordering as fundamentally different from social ordering based on state coercion. A summary of the ensuing chapters follows.