Michael Webber's excellent study of the diverse ways in which the market and state have impacted upon rural China is based on a decade and a half of annual research visits to far-flung areas of the Chinese countryside. Webber writes well, and he is able to convey a good sense of the stresses to which villagers were subjected in the locales he studied. As an example, in chapter three, Webber examines what happened to publicly owned rural township and village industrial enterprises (TVEs) during the 1990s in an area near Lake Taihu in Jiangsu province. Until the mid-1990s, profits were not the only goal of these enterprises; other important goals included the provision of employment for local people at decent wages and conditions.
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