Professor Yi-min Lin's earlier monography Between Politics and Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2001) remains one of the best analyses of China's first decade of enterprise reform. This new book is not so much a sequel as an expanded interpretation that covers another decade of reform, bringing us to the critical junction of global financial and economic crisis of 2008. Whereas his earlier book discussed the breakdown of the Soviet planned economy and pathways for converting state-owned productive assets into private legal entities, this book focuses on the enabling conditions for "the role of entrepreneurs and citizens-at-large in overcoming the obstacles to private ownership..." (4). These conditions have roots in structural trends in China's demographic profile and fiscal federalism, and created constraints under the complex logic and unintended consequences of the expansion of market forces. The central agency in this book is subnational officials and state-appointed managers, as they take politically risky, private boundary-pushing initiatives "against the political will of the CCP leadership" (5).
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