The fieldwork, survey and documentary research carried out in China between 2004 and 2007 would not have been possible without the help and cooperation of the many scholars, students and administrators in Yunnan and Beijing who freely gave their time to answer the many questions I put to them. My most important debt is to Professor Duan Eryu, who was my official counterpart at the Yunnan Provincial Party School. He had the courage and foresight to accommodate the outrageous request from a foreign anthropologist to be allowed into the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party. He not only arranged my fieldwork at the provincial and sub-provincial schools in Yunnan featuring in this book, but also became my most important informant and, in time, a personal friend. In facilitating other parts of the project, I would like to thank Zhao Baige, Fan Jianhua, Zhang Lihua, Shen Yuan, Liu Xirui, Xiang Biao, Yang He and several others who should remain anonymous. Excellent research assistance was given by Li Yongkang in Yunnan, Wu Qiquan and Zhang Huayang in Beijing and Meera Balarajan in Oxford.

In the course of writing the manuscript, I have burdened several friends with the thankless task of reading drafts of papers, chapters or even the whole manuscript. Chris Hann, Sun Xiangdong, Susan Greenhalgh, Bill Hurst, Brian McVeigh and an anonymous reviewer for Cambridge University Press are in no way responsible for any of the mistakes or omissions that remain, but should certainly be given much credit for whatever qualities the finished product has.