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1Lior Rosenberg’s Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-first Century poses the question: why did village redevelopment policy, which was intended to reduce inequality through the provision of public goods as part of the Building the New Socialist Countryside (Jianshe shehui zhuyi xin nongcun 建設社會主義新農村, BNSC) agenda, produce the opposite result, perpetuating or exacerbating inequality? Based on fieldwork conducted mainly between 2009 and 2011, the later years of the Hu–Wen Administration, the study compares implementation of the BNSC initiative in two counties – one wealthier, one poorer, in Shandong and Anhui Provinces, respectively. Rosenberg considers policy implementation to have failed, since local officials focused their New Socialist Countryside investments in better-off townships and villages (p. 29).

2The core strengths of this monograph are chapters Two and Five. Chapter Two draws attention to the important issue of within-rural inequality in its description of the pseudonymous Chenggu and Beian counties. This observation echoes the large-n findings of Sicular et al. (2020: 25–8); they report that, while the incidence of absolute poverty in rural China fell to 9% by 2013, and rural-urban income inequality declined due to the rapid growth of rural wage income, the Gini coefficient of income inequality within rural areas increased, reaching 0.41 by 2013. The dynamics of inequality are complex and multifaceted, and within-rural inequality remains a policy challenge, as highlighted by Rosenberg’s study.

3Chapter Five makes a notable contribution in its analysis of demonstration villages in the BNSC program. Rosenberg shows that local officials selected villages with the best economic conditions. Indeed, “the county expected villages to bear most of the redevelopment costs by themselves, and expenses were significant” (p. 143). Building effectively on the work of Heilmann (2008) and others, this chapter anticipates the large-n statistical results of Wang and Yang’s study of policy experiments and demonstration sites, which are “positively selected in terms of local economic conditions” and in which “local politicians exert greater effort” (2025: 2182). Similarly, Rosenberg finds that “the title ‘demonstration village’ (…) anointed and rewarded any village that was financially able to meet the prefectural city’s list of targets” (p. 150).

4Other aspects of this ambitious monograph are less satisfying. Chapter Three identifies perceptions of economic conditions as a key factor explaining village redevelopment policy at the grassroots (p. 32). The section heading “Living in a Poor Environment: Lack of Finances or Lack of Concern?” appears under a picture captioned “Garbage along a village path” (p. 64) and sets up the discussion in Chapter Three. Intervening in the suzhi 素質 debate among anthropologists, the author invokes attitudes and values of officials and villagers. “For local officials, successful redevelopment depended not only on the availability of better village facilities but also on the ability of the villagers (under the guidance of the local government) to change their ‘backward’ rural attitudes, habits, and perceptions and, as officials occasionally said, improve their ‘quality’” (p. 93). Rosenberg writes: “Despite the introduction of rubbish bins and disposal arrangements, it was ultimately up to individual villagers to decide whether to throw their rubbish in a bin or on the road” (p. 94). The author characterises “living in a poor environment [as] (…) a matter of choice and inertia” (p. 66). Chapters Two and Three present an implicit early-modernisation-theory approach to explaining village redevelopment, one that privileges values and attitudes over structural or institutional constraints. That these attitudes are prominent among rural officials is an interesting observation. The chapter would be even stronger if it clearly demonstrated how such attitudes shaped BNSC implementation, and the exposition could do more to distinguish between the views of local officials and those of the author himself.

5Chapters Four and Six address the use of targets and subsidies and the ways in which they ramified downward through levels of the administrative hierarchy to drive the BNSC agenda forward. While the most valuable research builds on the existing literature to cumulate and advance knowledge, these chapters seem to miss or rediscover earlier findings. For example, the author recounts how he queried township officials about why they did not “add even one target of [their] own” and why they did not “serve as government entrepreneurs” but instead “obey[ed] targets” (p. 103–6). This line of inquiry is less revealing in light of the “county-based” (yixian weizhu 以縣為主) reforms implemented during the Hu–Wen Administration “that shifted all rural public services to county management, along with their budgets” (Wong 2021: 7). As Wong et al. (2013: 269) note, it is “China's county governments [that] are charged with the responsibility of promoting long-term rural development and (…) improv[ing] infrastructure quality in villages.”

6In the final chapters of the book, Chapter Six, “Trapped in the System,” and Chapter Seven, “Conclusion,” the author introduces institutional constraints to explain why local officials selected better-off villages in which to implement the BNSC program. This discussion would have been better placed earlier in the study. The institutions shaping local cadre behaviour, including the cadre evaluation system and fiscal system, are well documented (Whiting 2001). The 1994 tax and fiscal reforms, which centralise control over revenue, perpetuate the decentralisation of expenditure responsibilities, and rely on multi-stranded – but inadequate – intergovernmental fiscal transfers, exacerbate the mismatch between local revenues and expenditures (Wong 2009, 2021). This mismatch results in fiscal shortfalls, particularly at the county level; at the same time, more developed localities have more budgetary and extra-budgetary revenue to spend on under-funded central mandates (Wong 1997, 2021). This “broken” fiscal system distorts the ways local officials implement policies and respond to performance targets (Wong 2009: 942). Given the crucial importance of the fiscal system – and, relatedly, local government debt – for the provision of public goods, it deserves more systematic attention in the book. Moreover, Rosenberg’s critique of the literature seems to set up a straw man: “Blind attribution of high levels of discretion and autonomy to grassroots officials’ conduct and decision-making risks over-simplifying a much more complex story” (p. 174). Chapter Six reads as a corrective to the focus on values and choice in preceding chapters.

7The author is also critical of studies employing a principal-agent framework (p. 193). In the literature on China, the principal-agent problem is employed to explain explicitly dysfunctional outcomes, such as over-investment and over-production of output by agents seeking to meet crude targets set by their principals (Whiting 2001: 111, 2004: 112). However, Rosenberg writes that “Central-local relations have commonly been articulated along the lines of a principal-agent relations framework, which connotes successful policy implementation with policy designers (the principal) having a high degree of control over the implementers (local agents)” (p. 8). This characterisation misreads the principal-agent problem, which is common in multi-tiered organisations and is defined by interest conflict and information asymmetry; this situation leads to characteristic problems such as moral hazard, e.g., in which the agent undertakes risky or otherwise less desirable actions, the costs of which are borne by the principal – a phenomenon described throughout the book.

8The existing literature further highlights the significance of village elections for local public goods provision. Studies of rural China have “consistently [found] that elected village officials provide better public goods than appointed ones, and that more democratic election procedures are associated with better provision” (Newland 2016: 886). Yet, during a period of relatively vibrant rural elections, they are not a factor in the explanation of public goods provision provided in the book.

9These concerns notwithstanding, the book is insightful in its attention to within-rural inequality and to the ways in which demonstration sites in the pro-poor BNSC policy positively select for better-off locales and even provide them with more resources.