It is commonplace in China studies to declare that China is too large and too diverse to be fully understood as one entity. Whether in historical or contemporary terms, a complete understanding of China can only be attempted if one looks at the diversity within. Too often, the analysis stops there, without pursuing the details of regional variation needed to develop a more sophisticated analysis.

Elizabeth Remick's Building Local States is a much-needed antidote to this tendency. In her carefully researched comparative monograph, Remick details how two very different regions – Hebei and Guangdong – developed local and regional government institutions in the context of central government upheaval and redefinition. Using local gazetteers, interviews with officials, published statistical records and archives, the book demonstrates how and why these two regions diverged in their approach to taxation and public finance. Faced with her own findings that show very little commonality between the two regions, Remick still manages to make an important, general conclusion: for the Chinese state to survive in the 21st century, it must allow regional adaptation to circumstance, or else the central regime will face increasing resistance to its interference, even to the point of tax revolts.

The book's subtitle, in particular, marks the book as exceptional: “China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras.” While both of these periods are popular topics, it is rare to compare them. On the face of it, the reasons for the comparison are unclear. Remick, though, effectively demonstrates that the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) and the post-Mao reform era (1980–1992) were both times of local state-building, spurred by a need to reassert government control in the wake of periods of great chaos (the warlord era of the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution, respectively).